Category: Insights

Categories
IT Agility

Eliminating avoidable truck rolls to save costs and improve customer satisfaction

Leverage statistical analysis and service truck roll optimizer for better field service efficiency

Truck rolls are an integral part of field service operations. It refers to any situation in which a technician is dispatched to solve an issue. But often, a field technician is dispatched to a job that is temporary in nature or can be resolved in under five minutes with a quick fix. Situations like these have become a huge pain point for service organizations.

A peculiar challenge faced by most Service Providers is that 25% of the truck rolls in their fleet are deemed non-value-add (NVA) or avoidable, costing millions each year. The process of creating truck roll appointments and subsequent follow-up activities still involves a lot of manual work. The customer service representatives (CSRs) create work orders manually without thorough assessment, resulting in avoidable or non-value-added truck rolls.

Service Providers must adopt a proven approach to address truck roll inefficiency issues. Transform field service management processes using techniques like:

  • Service truck roll optimization– Filters the NVA truck rolls and updates the work logs in the CRM system. Only the work orders that do not meet the business filter criteria will result in truck rolls
  • Pareto principle and correlation analysis– Uses analytics to identify the main causes for NVA truck rolls


25% of the truck rolls in a service provider’s fleet are deemed non-value-add (NVA) or avoidable, thus costing millions each year.

Categories
Cloud Insights

Don’t let the infrastructure management cloud your mind

Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to reduce provisioning time by 65%

IT infrastructures are generally imagined as big rooms with huge servers and systems connected with a web of wires. Provisioning of this infrastructure has always been a manual process for the service providers in the connectedness industry, which leads to a lot of accuracy and consistency issues. The advent of cloud computing helped in addressing most of these issues. However, the configuration consistency, manual scalability, and cost issues persisted. Also, deploying complex infrastructure solutions requires considerable effort from cloud architects. These efforts are neither easy to repeat nor modified in a single shot.

To overcome these challenges, service providers can implement a DevOps Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodology, which helps in automating the manual, error-prone provisioning tasks. It allows service providers to define the final state infrastructure, application configurations, and scaling policies in a codified way. This, in turn, reduces the dependency on cloud architects and provisioning time significantly.


Infrastructure as Code (IaC) helps the service providers to define the cloud infrastructure, application configurations, and scaling policies in a codified way.

Categories
IT Agility

Close the gap in network inventory to improve customer service

Leverage an RPA-based solution strategy to address inventory data inaccuracies and have a better insight into your network

Network inventory is the cornerstone for any service provider. To deliver seamless network services, assets and infrastructure (computers, routers, servers etc.) are a must. And the inventory available with an operator determines the kind, quality, and capacity of any services they offer. Therefore, these assets are crucial as service providers in the connectedness industry cannot operate without them.

However, service providers face several challenges in managing the completeness and accuracy of inventory data. Inventory data issues majorly arise due to human errors by field engineers, multiple sources of truth as a result of mergers and acquisitions and non-digital data storage formats. These issues eventually increase the lead time for new installs/repairs, high volumes of calls by field technicians to the customer care, frequent provisioning fallouts, etc.

Service providers must take a holistic solution approach to tackle the core challenges that are crippling them from effectively managing the network inventory data integrity issues. Manual data reconciliation projects are proving to be ineffective as they are labor-intensive, time-consuming and cannot handle network environments that are rapidly changing. Adopt an RPA-based automated inventory reconciliation framework to accelerate data integrity programs and improve service.

Figure 1: RPA-based Automated Inventory Reconciliation Framework


Service providers’ network inventory systems are often 20-30% out of sync with the physical and logical state of the network. An RPA-based automated inventory reconciliation framework can accelerate data integrity programs.

Categories
Software Intensive Networks

Building a 360° Network Cockpit

Implement an intelligent network visualization solution powered by Graph technology to deliver network insights faster.

Owing to rapid network expansion, major service providers in the connectedness industry are facing a critical challenge with the rise of data silos in their ecosystem. As a result, network data is dispersed across a variety of siloed and disjointed systems. This makes deriving insights from data collected across diverse assets more difficult. Several disconnected systems that consist of untraceable integrations and interfaces must be integrated to get a comprehensive view of the massive dataset. As a result, the service providers face inefficient network and resource utilization, delays in rolling out new network designs, and ineffective network troubleshooting.

There is a necessity for service providers in the connectedness industry to build a real-time 360° Network Visualization to drive smart decision making. Most service providers have started to implement Graph databases to address the problem of data silos and information irregularities in Network management. To be effective, service providers must develop both upstream and downstream data ingestion strategies. In this insight, we explore these two key components in-depth and identify the key capabilities required to build them effectively. Incorporating the 360° real-time network visualization approach can create a convergent and intelligent view of the network. In the Connectedness market, it helps to meet the growing demands of Network Planning, Network Operations (NOCs), and various user communities.


Eliminate data silos and irregularity challenges in Network management and accelerate design rollout by 33%.

Categories
IT Agility

Attract and retain customers with enhanced broadband service coverage

Leverage a unified serviceability framework to improve the service qualification

Today, most service providers in the connectedness industry are challenged in determining the service availability for different customer addresses as it is cumbersome and time-consuming. Ineffective broadband service qualification results in the poor customer experience of the existing customers and the unserviceability of new customers. Hence service providers need to focus on improving the serviceability for retaining and enlarging the customer base. The major factors contributing to ineffective service qualification include:

  • Lack of support for multiple technologies (e.g.) Copper, Fiber, IPTV, Cable, Fixed Wireless
  • Lack of agility to accommodate the real-time needs of the customer
  • No standard address and service repositories
  • Inaccurate measurement of loop length, resulting in reduced service offering

Service providers can leverage a unified serviceability framework to overcome these challenges and improve the serviceability of the customers. It assists in responding to customer requests rapidly with improved customer engagements and real-time responses for service qualification inquiries. Further, it helps to improve the overall broadband qualification coverage and customer experience.


Ineffective broadband service qualification results in the poor customer experience of the existing customers and the unserviceability of new customers.

Categories
IT Agility

Achieve security objectives at speed with automated vulnerability management

Reduce time taken to fix security vulnerabilities by 50% with vulnerability analysis best practices

Cyber-attacks are increasing every day and are now the third-highest global risk, according to the World Economic Forum. GSMA’s mobile telecommunications security threat landscape report of 2019 says, “there was a 55% increase in breaches caused by open-source software vulnerabilities”.

Addressing security vulnerabilities is a top priority for service providers in the connectedness industry because a cyber-attack could disrupt services for millions of customers, impact customer’s trust, and deteriorate service provider’s brand & reputation. To achieve the required security objectives, service providers must adopt a structured approach to vulnerability management. Vulnerability management, which is the process of finding, assessing, remediating, and mitigating security weaknesses for known assets, gives service providers the ability to assess the status and risk of unknown hardware/software.

Depending on the service provider’s infrastructure size and state of the configuration management database (CMDB), finding the responsible asset owner can be a highly challenging and cumbersome task, resulting in lead times of up to many weeks. Therefore, vulnerability management must include automation to discover new vulnerabilities, perform risk assessment, and assign it to the right team for a quick resolution.


Addressing security vulnerabilities with speed is a top priority for service providers as a successful cyber-attack can essentially disrupt service for millions of customers

Fig:  Steps followed in field service operation showcasing the importance of spare information

Categories
Software Intensive Networks

Accelerate SD-WAN service delivery to serve the pent-up demand for the enterprise connectivity

Automate and digitize workflows to achieve touchless SD-WAN configuration, provisioning, and activation

Before the pandemic, SD-WAN was primarily marketed to enterprises to reduce costs and improve flexibility. As businesses realized the pressure to go digital, cloud applications became the foundation for most organizations, enhancing their productivity and collaboration. What eventually evolved into an absolute necessity was to run these essential applications more efficiently, on a more reliable network -which is why SDWAN has become one of the most successful networking functions in decades. What will further fuel this adoption is the recent shift to a mostly remote or hybrid workforce model. According to a report by IDG Research Services and Masergy, over 90% of organizations expect to adopt an SDWAN solution eventually.

For businesses, Managed SDWAN Services provide attractive opportunities to tap into the growing SDWAN market and create new revenue streams. As per Markets and Markets Research, the global SD-WAN market size is expected to grow from USD 1.9 billion in 2020 to USD 8.4 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 34.5% during the forecast period.

But businesses can seize this opportunity only if they fulfill their customer needs on
time – by quickly activating the SD-WAN services. Potential roadblocks such as validating network compatibility, managing the service across multiple platforms, and solving the integration, operational and process-centric challenges can significantly delay the order to activate journey – leading to revenue loss and missed opportunities.


To accelerate the entire Order-to-Activate journey, businesses must eliminate process inefficiencies and embrace automation and digitalization at various levels.

To accelerate the entire order to activate journey, businesses must eliminate process inefficiencies and embrace automation and digitalization at various levels. This also means building a holistic tool that enables consolidating and automating workflows to achieve touchless SDWAN configuration, provisioning, and activation.

Categories
Operational Excellence

Breaking down the barriers to scale RPA across the enterprise

Proven methodologies to create a steady pipeline of processes to be automated

Service providers across the globe are at various stages in their journey to embrace robotic process automation (RPA) to increase their operational efficiency. But scaling RPA and making it an organization-wide success is a big challenge. As per Deloitte’s Global Robotics Report 2018, over 80% of organizations implementing RPA were happy with the results, but only 1% of them could scale considerably in the past 1 year (50+ bots in a year).

The inability to identify appropriate use cases after initial implementations are the major bottleneck for service providers. The lack of end-to-end visibility of the process by the siloed business units further adds to this plight.

Service providers must explore various methodologies to create a steady process pipeline that can be automated. These techniques are – comprehensive analysis, design thinking workshop, and process mining.

Figure 1: RPA Demand Generation Methodologies

Download the Insight to learn about the techniques in detail and learn how to choose the correct method as per your organization’s maturity stage.


As per Deloitte, 80% of organizations implementing RPA were happy with the results, but only 1% of them were able to scale considerably in the next 1 year

Categories
Digital Customer Experience

Simplify e-commerce selling

Gain wins by successfully recreating the offline buying experiences online

Understanding your customers needs and preferences has become increasingly crucial to winning in the digital economy. Digital commerce excels at providing choices to the long tail of users. Yet this very strength can result in a lack of intuitiveness for customers.

The promise of friction free commerce is a receding horizon. One reason is that the websites and user interfaces fail to comprehend their customers, leaving them confused and disappointed. As a result, the customer ends up switching to offline stores, which impacts the business’s potential to monetize their eCommerce platform.


The success of the digital economy increasingly depends on knowing your customers’ needs and preferences.

As an enterprise, you need to uncover innovative ways to transform your e-commerce platform. Adopt disruptive solutions that will revolutionize your e-commerce space by encouraging more customers to go online. Focus on these four key areas to re-imagine your e-commerce platform:

  • Perform competitor, product and customer analysis to benchmark ideas and bring in best practices
  • Visualize how users behave and interact across the web pages to improve user engagement
  • Use features (e.g., flagging), tools, and systems to swiftly deliver new products and offerings to customers
  • Build SEO engine to improve site performance
Categories
Salesforce

CRM and the holy grail of personalization

Leverage Salesforce Communications Cloud to increase efficiency of care agents, while reducing overall TCO by 15%

The leading telecom, entertainment and technology companies in the world are opting for new innovative levels of customer care to keep up with the evolving customer preferences. One effective way to improve customer care is by turning to personalization to differentiate the offerings. Businesses can unlock new streams of revenue by bundling existing products or services (or unbundling to offer ‘singles’) based on the customer’s needs.

The legacy customer relationship management (CRM) infrastructure often restricts the company’s operations. Some of the main challenges faced by the customer care agents due to legacy CRM systems are:

  • The data must be sourced from several different applications, resulting in varied data formats
  • The absence of technology-specific API integrations for billing, invoicing, etc., restricts the order management flow
  • Frequent manual intervention kills efficiency, thanks to errors and slow resolution of customer issues
  • No scope for providing a personalized experience due to lack of insights on customer’s buying habits

CRM


Salesforce is an extremely powerful platform right out of the box. But to reap maximum benefits, enterprises must focus on the right set of transformation levers.

One powerful approach to delivering a relevant customer experience is modernizing the existing CRM with Salesforce Communications Cloud. The Salesforce platform provides loads of capabilities such as order orchestration, automation of case assignments, and hyper-personalized experience to customers.

The platform is extremely powerful, right out of the box. But to reap the maximum benefits, enterprises must focus on the right set of transformation levers. This includes using Salesforce’s low-code platform capabilities, applying the Process Builder automation tool to automate case assignment, and customizing the TMF endpoints to provide a personalized touch. With the help of these levers, enterprises can effectively connect all the dots for integrating customer data, personalizing customer interactions, and transforming digital experiences.