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A Winning Ticket

A Winning Ticket

Canadian telco Telus has taken customer service to a new level with the SLAs of 99.7 per cent availability - per site, per service, per month - or the customer gets a rebate. How are they delivering on that promise?

LaChance's message is twofold. First, that delivering on SLAs is not a pipe dream - it can be done. And second, that it is no longer good enough in the modern environment for any service provider merely to do network management: monitoring the network and reacting when it hiccups. Indeed, in the future Telus wants to monitor the precise impact on customers of any service failure.

"I think that a lot of people have a hard time in distinguishing what the customer impact is when you talk about service interruption,"LaChance says. "What we're trying to do is not so much establish that there's an issue in the network, but [understand] the services that were interrupted. How did that impact our customer?"

Telus achieved something along those lines, albeit only on a manual basis, as service provider for the World Summer Games in Edmonton, Alberta, where by placing certain conditions around various services it was able to set severity levels. Now it wants to take the next step and assess the true impact of failures on the customer.

"In order to do that and be able to attribute what the lifetime value of that customer is, the whole corporation has to get behind this. It isn't just operations."For instance, she says, marketing should develop a rating system that ranks customers by priority of action. The customer care area has to understand what the numbers mean so that they can ensure valuable customers aren't inconvenienced, even from the most minor problems or faults.

"It's all about getting a competitive edge and giving the customer a full suite of connectivity and giving them one name to identify with when they go to the market,"LaChance says. "We're trying to give them all those options. In other words, whether they want high-speed lambda services or a simple DSL line to someone's cabin out on the lake, we want to be able to provide those services. But if there's any linkage between that DSL line to the cabin and that lambda service, we should know that. We should know that internally."

And Telus also wants to be able to escalate warnings based on business impact, rather than on the SLA signed with the customer, as is now the case. "In other words, if a trouble ticket gets cut and even if we have a certain amount of time before we are going to be in breach of the SLA, the escalations happen automatically in the trouble ticketing system. They'll start paging out up to the manager, up to the director level and so on, to make sure that all the possible help is provided to get those issues resolved."

From there Telus hopes to add new and exciting services for customers. "Companies have big appetites for bandwidth in North America, so we want to be able to do this type of SLA management for such things as in our optical and lambda services (see below left) as we do with all our ATM and Ethernet environments,"LaChance says. "We want to be able to do things like auto provisioning where possible, auto correlation, bandwidth on demand.

"And at the same time as we're expanding and being able to provide all these new and fun things for the customer, we always want to make sure we're able to still provide the absolute concrete monitoring that we have today, and reporting and SLA agreements."

LaChance says the organisation has been able to take two major lessons from the exercise.

First, the importance of always ensuring your technology is buffered from the customer. Customers want to purchase services, not technology, she says. In essence, most customers don't care if their service is delivered over tin can and strings or the latest, greatest optical equipment. "As long as they know that it's getting delivered and that that application is working for them, the technology should be transparent to them,"she says.

And second, the importance of communications back to the customer to keep them informed of your activities on their behalf. "I think a report card is one of the most important things that you can give back to the customer on how their service is doing. So they know you know about their business and you can report back to them on how well you're doing to assist them in their business,"LaChance says.

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