For Customers, Service Quality During This Period Matters Most

When does the customer experience matter most?

1. The last six months before the contract renewal date.
2. The first year.
3. The first 30 days.

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If you answered C, you’re correct. The bulk of customer problems will arise in the first 30 days of service. While it’s important to have happy customers through their entire lifecycle to avoid churn, it is imperative that providers have the tools necessary to get service deployed quickly and seamlessly.

In a previous post, Poor Customer Experience Remains Achilles’ of Digital Transformation for Telecom, we discussed that downtime, poor call quality, and lackluster service were holding back the digital transformation. Providers using rip-and-replace methods are approaching new services like unified communications (UC) at a costly and inconvenient angle.

Companies of all sizes want and need to move forward. The adoption rate alone for UC in the small and medium enterprise market is set to grow exponentially over the next two or three years. But for the adoption laggards, it’s facing downtime that is the biggest hurdle. Whether it’s a small, medium, or enterprise business, having communications down for a day or two is enough to say “no thanks” to the vast array of benefits.

Three Goals of the Customer Experience

From customer acquisition to installation, and through the first 30 days, providers should have three goals in mind at all times:

1. Reduce Provisioning and Installation Intervals
2. Timely First 30 Day Response
3. Proactive Service Management

It’s costly and difficult to gain new customers, so actively working to keep them satisfied to avoid churn is fundamental to a healthy business. To do this, providers need tools at their disposal like Network Edge Orchestration. With Network Edge Orchestration, providers have interoperable intelligent edges that communicate bi-directionally with a service control center so that installation is simplified and services can be monitored and managed through an end-to-end network view.

Mastering Provisioning and Installation

Before installation even happens, providers can make a poor impression on customers. To help avoid common mistakes, here are best practices to eliminate pain points and customer frustration during provisioning and installation:

• Test interoperability for all solution components (switch, routers, phones, etc.)
• Bundle premises components at distribution for drop shipment to customer
• Use Network Edge Orchestration to ‘flow through’ provisioning from OSS/BSS
• Standardize configuration templates for each solution element, monitor and enforce the service control center
• Use Zero Touch Provisioning to minimize time and budget consuming truck rolls

Setting a Customer Experience Foundation

After the first two days of installation, providers must continue to ride the “hassle-free” wave by using Network Edge Orchestration with a cloud-based service control center to:

• Access all CPE and IP endpoints
• Identify and isolate LAN issues from WAN issues
• Set high service quality thresholds and use intelligent edges to monitor and report on every call
• Use analytics and reporting to quickly identify deviations from normal service quality
• Put tools in the hands of Tier 1 support agents for better customer communication

Stay Proactive

The capstone to the customer experience is proactive service management. By committing to monitoring call quality and service metrics, providers can actually stop issues before customers feel the impact. This can be accomplished by:

• Setting event triggers (low MOS, dropped SIP registrations) in the service control center to capture intermittent service quality issues
• Defining specific actions to ‘Event Triggers’ to assist in troubleshooting and remediation
• Using all service control center tools (packet capture on WAN and LAN interfaces, active line tests, TCP dumps, etc.) in an automated fashion for rapid remediation

Next-Level Customer Experience with Network Edge Orchestration

Avoiding hassles is not enough to satisfy the dimensional customer experience. Customers expect a me-centric service approach where the provider is constantly striving to make their service better and less complicated. Network Edge Orchestration allows provisioning, monitoring, and configuration to all be completed with ease.

With over 500,000 EdgeMarc Intelligent Edges under management, we’re experts in helping our customers reduce capital and operational expenditures, while also providing a high-quality experience that doesn’t lead to nail-biting when contracts come up for renewal. To learn more about what Network Edge Orchestration can do for service quality, watch our on-demand webinar: Tales from the Field –What Network Edge Orchestration Really Does, As Told by Users.

This post was written by John Macario, Senior Vice President of Marketing & Product Management at Edgewater Networks. To learn more about Edgewater Networks, click here.

To learn more about Edgewater Networks‘ solutions, you can contact the 888VoIP team at 888-864-7786 and get information on Edgewater SBCs, Gateways, Cloud2Edge Complete, and more!