The telecommunications industry today is focused on delivering advanced, reliable connectivity and the highest possible performance to consumers, all while getting ahead of the cutthroat competition.
And accomplishment in these key areas comes with its fair share of challenges for communications service providers (CSPs) to meet customer expectations. There’s the “bundle battle” as Deloitte refers to the groups of services CSPs are offering to deliver value to consumers, with options like fiber and 5G fixed wireless access (FWA), and partnerships with entertainment services to offer free or discounted subscriptions. But with these bundles comes the risk of lost revenue and the potential inability to scale as needed.
Telcos also face considerable challenges related to the public cloud, with concerns for CSPs.
More than 80 percent of respondents in a Telecoms.com survey said they had fears about security concerns over running telco applications in the public cloud. Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed reported difficulty in making a business case for public cloud, as private cloud remains vital in addressing security issues.
Despite challenges that come from accelerating technological advancement, success stories along the way prove that the benefits of innovation far outweigh the risks. IT automation unlocks what telcos can achieve in terms of incident resolution, employee productivity, operational costs, customer experiences, and more. Below are four real use cases of how Resolve helped leading telcos achieve business goals through automation:
Accelerate Incident Resolution
Time cut for incident diagnostics: Six minutes to four seconds
The telco customer in this use case was losing time, dealing with too many escalations. L1 engineers, due to lack of tools, knowledge, or access to applications like Cerillian CRM would have to escalate tickets to L2/L3 engineers.
The lost time and overload of escalations impacted the level of customer support the company was able to provide, causing a great deal of inefficiency.
How Resolve Helped: By adopting Resolve, they gained the ability to centralize all call centers into one single location. L1 agents (Customer Service Reps) got a full view of the infrastructure, services provided, equipment validation, and account status.
Upon plugging in information from the customer into a Resolve self-service portal, a workflow gets kicked off. The workflow looks at network status and reports back if there is a known issue. Resolve provides the L1 agents with next steps, and applicable runbooks, and escalates tickets as needed if the issue cannot be taken care of.
Increase Employee Productivity
IT Support Staff Productivity Increase: 30 percent
A telco Resolve customer was growing, as their business increased by about 30 percent without any additional personnel added to their support and NOC teams. The customer wanted to more efficiently diagnose firewall incidents, validate events and alarms coming from Splunk and SolarWinds platforms, and perform health tests and checks.
How Resolve Helped: Alarms automatically trigger Resolve workflows without needing any agent input. The runbook determines the type of alert and automatically opens a trouble ticket in BMC Remedy. The runbook triages the alarm and assigns it to the appropriate group for advanced troubleshooting and resolution.
Resolve workflows interact with just about any IT tool and system, including Netcool, ServiceNow, Splunk, SolarWinds, BMC Remedy, DNS (NCM), Precision, SevOne, JD Edwards, Active Directory (AD), and DRUM Continuity to run queries and determine the overall network health, and then automatically open tickets for results deemed problem/failure.
Reduce Operational Expense
Monthly IT Operations Cost Savings: $1.3 million
A leading U.S. telco wanted to reach and maintain 24/7 uptime across its network while delivering the highest level of customer service, and do so without ripping and replacing current diagnostic systems. Improving their first-call resolution rates by enhancing existing network monitoring capabilities was a major step toward positive customer experiences.
How Resolve Helped: Resolve Actions is implemented as a complete troubleshooting platform used by Level 1 agents, to allow them to solve complex problems that they’d typically have to escalate to Tier 2/Tier 3 engineers. The Resolve platform becomes the central repository for bringing in the important information, configuration, and customer intelligence. Every customer call triggers a Resolve workflow that automates tasks across BMC Remedy, Netcool and other IT systems, and also orchestrates a variety of homegrown scripts.
Improve Customer Experience
Monthly Customer Calls Eliminated: 6,500
A provider of broadband, TV, mobile phone, and home phone services in the U.K. was looking to increase help desk productivity to keep operators focused on open tickets for valid incidents and make sure customers were notified of an outage in a timely manner.
How Resolve Helped: Implementing Resolve Actions aided this customer in reducing the volume of calls into its call center by one-third. Resolve proactively set up messages in the company’s Interactive voice response (IVR) systems to automate responses during outages. Resolve workflows are also scheduled to check for Splunk events with a severity of “clear” that are older than 10 minutes. These events are flagged in BMC Remedy to allow help desk operators to focus on valid events and tickets.
Scheduled workflows periodically check servers to reduce manual steps, preventing noise for help deck operators by dropping cleared tickets. This helps increase call deflection for the customer contact center by ensuring valid tickets are opened and resolved as quickly as possible.
This customer gained benefits from more than $200,000 in annual savings, a 21 percent reduction in customer calls, a 46 percent reduction in ICOMS faults, and 6,500 fewer calls into the help desk center.
