Month: September 2022

Categories
IT Agility

Cure data pollution at source with data intelligence engine

Leveraging data-driven network inventory wizard to arrest 90% of errors

Service providers in the Connectedness industry manage inventory data, consisting of their assets and services that are critical to their operations. These assets grow every day, making them difficult to manage. In general, the service providers manually register their inventories once their capacity management team forecasts and decides to expand the network. Hence, building an efficient inventory management system with an intelligent User Interface (UI) becomes important to guide the users in the registration process. The lack of such intelligent registration tools will hinder the ability to plan optimized networks resulting in delayed service, poor customer satisfaction, and loss of revenue.

Some of the key factors that lead to inventory data issues are

  • Manual registration of assets and services in the OSS inventory
  • Duplication of records due to lack of efficient validation tools
  • Multiple siloed inventories

To overcome the above-mentioned issues, service providers need to Introduce a data-driven inventory wizard with business rules to improve the registration quality and arrest the errors at the source, thereby maintaining a high quality of data in OSS inventory.,/p>

With a data-driven inventory wizard in place, service providers can realize major benefits in data integrity of inventory, such as:

  • Timesaving: Improves manual registration time by 87.5%.
  • Accuracy in data: Registration accuracy on an average improves from 70.5% to 98%.
  • Reduced efforts: Reduces manual data entry by 65% and the rework to be done due to errors during manual registration

Regardless of the tools or technologies used to tackle data integrity issues, discrepancies still happen. This issue must be fixed during the manual registration process to have a high-quality inventory data.

Fig: Key Capabilities to be built on data-driven inventory wizard

Categories
IT Agility

Building an effective order processing system with easy tracking

Leverage smart dashboards for end-to-end order tracking and monitoring to prevent order fallouts and enhance customer experience

An efficient order lifecycle management (OLM) is vital for a smooth order process at every stage, starting from order placement to order delivery. The OLM must provide seamless experiences for both businesses and consumers to gain a competitive advantage.

However, service providers in the connectedness industry often experience challenges associated with siloed systems, order complexity, legacy systems, and manual order tracking. These lead to increased order fallout, high OPEX, reduced customer satisfaction and low order visibility.

Figure : Challenges in Order Lifecycle Management

Service providers must enable an end-to-end view of the orders, throughout the workflow, with real-time status to reduce the order fallouts and revenue leakage in a big way. An Order Assurance Dashboard with Backend Integration is the most optimized solution to a majority of Order Lifecycle Challenges. This dashboard provides:

  • Integration with backend systems: Provide APIs for quicker integration with all underlying systems which are part of the order lifecycle and fetch order status from each of them
  • End-to-end view of the order: Provide a view of all the orders as they pass from order entry to provisioning to billing
  • Order fallout tracking: Track and highlight orders which have breached SLA for immediate action
  • Reporting: Provide order flow reports on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis for individual products/services and regions
  • System health monitoring: Perform continuous monitoring to provide performance report and availability of all the integrated systems.​This will help in taking preventive measures and avoiding revenue leakage

An end-to-end view of the orders with real-time status tracking reduces order fallouts and revenue leakage in a big way.

Categories
Operational Excellence

Building a successful Technical Support Center

Use proven tools and techniques to improve the efficiency of Technical Assistance Center (TAC), reduce inbound repeat calls and customer trouble tickets

Today, telecommunication is no longer limited to voice. In the past few years, the industry has rapidly grown to accommodate multiple services. In this era of multi-play, service providers in the connectedness industry are adding various services to their catalog, such as voice, messaging, broadband, IPTV, DTH, VAS etc. And to support these services, service providers have technical assistance centers (TACs) to help customers resolve issues related to specific services.

However, service providers have been facing challenges in maintaining and improving the efficiency and productivity of TACs as much of their efforts go into non-value-adding (NVA) tasks causing resource wastage. NVA tasks can be classified into following categories:

Figure : NVA Waste Classification

Further analysis of NVAs (over-processing, rework, waiting, etc.) shows that managing a high volume of inbound repeat calls and tickets and operating with distributed tools are the major challenges of a TAC.

To mitigate these challenges, service providers must explore innovative and field-proven tools and techniques, including robot-assisted screening, Proactive Network Analyzer etc. By implementing these techniques, service providers can easily realize a 30- 40% reduction in inbound repeat calls and customer trouble tickets.

“In a typical service provider’s technical assistance center (TAC) landscape, many tasks are NVA (non-value adding), leading to resource wastage”

Categories
Digital Customer Experience

Establishing digital trust in intercarrier settlements

Leverage blockchain to automate dispute management and reduce the settlement time

Service providers in the connectedness industry receive intercarrier invoices worth over USD 1.2 billion annually and are challenged with revenue blockage of more than 25% due to disputes. Managing disputes and improving trust in intercarrier settlements is challenging for service providers. The traditional approach of dispute analysis and resolution is inefficient, delaying settlements for several months. The most common causes of dysfunction are:

  • Multiple siloed teams and manual handoffs cause delays between invoice auditing and settlement
  • Prolonged and expensive verification of claims due to third-party intervention
  • Dependency on intermediaries for settlements is prone to high-security risks

The aforementioned challenges increase the cost of managing and resolving disputes. As the interconnect margins continue to decline, shifting to a smarter dispute management process will become critical for addressing the revenue blockages. Blockchain-powered dispute management increases the security, transparency, and traceability of settlement data shared across the network, reducing the settlement time by 60%. The inherent capabilities of blockchain reduce the dependency on intermediaries, with a simple, near real-time, error-free reconciliation and settlement process.

Leverage blockchain-powered dispute management to reduce the settlement time

Implementing blockchain-powered dispute management increases the security, transparency, and traceability of settlement data shared across the network, thereby reducing the settlement time by 60%.