MiriMON for Customer Care

The customer care function includes call centre staff, 2nd/3rd line technical support staff and engineers that visit the customer premises.

Service Providers have no real-time perspective of the quality of experience they deliver to each and every customer. There is an implied assumption that service is good, unless the customer complains.

Customers may tolerate poor service quality for a while, possibly without complaining, but there is a high probability they will eventually decide to churn. Unfortunately for the Service Provider, this will often only become apparent when it is too late to keep them. Typical industry statistics are that for every twenty five unhappy customers, only one complains.

Service Providers typically have limited visibility of the performance of the access network (last-mile network connection) or the end-to-end service delivery. It is not economic to place network probes at these extremes of the network. Even with a healthy core infrastructure, access network and consumer device, poor service problems can occur due to complex end-to-end issues, such as errors with metadata, content encoding, signal routing etc. These problems may go unnoticed by OSS and probe systems, but will be apparent to the consumer and reported through the customer care systems with no accurate information to aid analysis.

Service Providers typically have limited visibility of the health and performance of the consumer device in the home. Historically it has not been practical to monitor consumer devices until now. Device monitoring can identify problems before they occur, for instance a hard disk drive exhibiting errors that indicate the device is performing poorly and will most likely fail. Without device monitoring these issues have to be dealt with reactively, as “urgent” support calls to the customer care team once the failure has occurred.

In the event of a support engineer visiting the customer premises to analyse a reported fault, but not being able to identify any issue during the visit (possibly due to an intermittent problem), it is common for the engineer to swap-out the box. This is generally the only tangible thing the engineer can do to appease the customer, in the absence of an alternative explanation and a clear resolution to the problem.

The problems MiriMON^® addresses:

MiriMON ensures that poor service does not go unnoticed and provides information to help the
Service Provider rectify problems before the customer becomes a churn statistic.

As MiriMON provides alerts when customers are receiving a poor service, the Service Provider can proactively apologise or provide some compensation.
During major problems the Service Provider can provide appropriate automated messages on the support lines to reassure customers that the problem is being addressed.

Faults are often complex or intermittent and customers may not have the technical skills to make the correct observations or correctly execute manual tests to aid diagnosis.
Being walked through numerous manual checks and tests during a telephone call can be irritating and adds to the perception of poor quality.
MiriMON’s accurate, objective measurement and view of service history provides the information to speed up fault diagnosis and provide a more professional care experience for the consumer.

MiriMON provides the information to make the correct fault diagnosis and resolve the problem first-time.

MiriMON’s proactive information to a number of functions within a Service Provider allows endemic and repetitive faults to be avoided and allows many one-off faults to be resolved before the customer calls to complain. This reduces the inbound support calls.

MiriMON provides the information to make the correct fault diagnosis and resolve the problem, where possible, without resorting to a home visit (truck-roll).

MiriMON can provide the engineer with an information report which may identify a known fault state or will at least provide contextual information to assist testing and analysis in the home.
This enables the engineer to provide a more informed and professional service while reducing the duration of the home visit.

Avoiding unnecessary truck-rolls and providing the engineer with diagnostic information will reduce the instance of consumer devices being unnecessarily swapped out.

Proactive notification of faults and problems
A real-time view of individual customer service delivery and quality of experience (QoE)
A historical view of individual customer service delivery and QoE
Accurate information about the performance of the end-to-end system elements for an individual customer, allowing root cause analysis of the fault.
Root cause analysis of faults is further supported by information about whether related devices (same sub-network, device type or service) are exhibiting similar behaviour.
The customer service representative can see whether the fault is confined to individual customer’s system or whether it is a wider fault affecting a number of customers.