I dropped into a quarterly business review that one of the Account Managers was doing with one of our customers last week. I like to do this from time to time to hear it for myself directly from the customer. It helps me understand the customers and gives me an opportunity to discuss our platform post-sale and integration.
This particular customer is a Telecommunications Carrier out of North America that runs a lot of wireless and fibre and is rapidly expanding.
The Head of Network Operations was on the call, and for the purposes of keeping the identity private, let’s call him Joe.
Joe talked about the snowstorms and how it impacts their network and field services team. The way it works is that the NOC team gets an alert, does some diagnosis and decides what process needs to occur. To send field service staff means that the problem is something that cannot be remotely fixed. Sending the team out in bad weather to work on wireless equipment is hard on the people who do the work, but at the end of the day, to quote Joe, “we pride ourselves on great customer service.”
Before this customer had opEvents installed, they would have a high rate of field service calls that would result in no fault found during snowstorms. This means that the field services team were not being sent to fix real field-related problems. For any company with a field services team, you know how important it is to send these guys to real problems.
The impact for the customer was that to clear all the events would take days, with over 50% being false reports.
During recent snowstorms, opEvents would handle the alert and find the source problem. The NOC team then could send the field services team out in the snow to investigate and fix the problems. Joe said that the level of accuracy in the alerts was fantastic and the NOC and Field Services Team rebuilt their trust and had confidence that they were being sent to a real fault.
When Joe studied the impact that the FirstWave Platform brought to the table, opEvents reduced event storms to zero, deduplication was no longer a problem and only pushed real events to the team. Field service calls were reduced and the network was brought back to normal in half the time.
“We had a lot of competitors’ customers switch to us during the snowstorms. The amount of downtime we suffered was minimal as we were right on top of any faults, we knew where they were and their severity and deployed our field services team accurately. It puts us ahead of the market.”
