Network intelligence and automation

Managing the 2020 home—don’t wait for your customers to call you

The landscape of the subscriber home is changing, with an escalating number of connected devices, a greater dependency on Wi-Fi, and more complex home networks with network extenders. New services such as IoT and virtual reality will continue to drive the need for reliable connectivity in the home. Managing the connected home has become a complex task and is quickly becoming a major differentiator for service providers looking to elevate the customer experience.

Find problems before your customers do

If, as one customer survey reported1, 85 percent of consumers never (or rarely) call customer service to complain about the quality of their service, it is vital to find and address problems before your customers notice and become dissatisfied.

Deploying a service assurance solution proactively focused in the areas of field service, call-center support, and self-service not only fixes problems for consumers but also drives a reduction in OpEx.

CommScope’s Service Assurance solution helps you create a proactive customer care organization. Preemptively finding and resolving problems specific to an individual subscriber can deliver the following benefits:

• Improve service levels
• Control operating costs as technology advances
• Focus on customer intimacy rather than technical acumen or cost-cutting
• Reduce customer churn and turn your customers into your best advocates
• Increase net promoter scores (NPS)

Continuously monitoring the customer experience is crucial to transforming how you provide customer care. The primary areas of focus can be defined in three ways:

• Data collection—Frequently gathering information from all endpoints where services are consumed, including customer premises equipment (modems, routers, wireless access points, set-top boxes) and software clients (e.g., applications on mobile devices)
• Real-time correlation—Identifying problem characteristics and running diagnostics against the historical data collected to evaluate the health of services and equipment
• Customer experience analysis—Analyzing diagnostic information to determine if the quality of service reaches key thresholds or is being disrupted

Using a solution that monitors the customer experience makes it much easier to find subscribers in trouble. The ultimate goal is to fix the problem before the customer is even aware of the issue, and swap equipment or roll a technician to the home only if it is necessary.

New cases are routed immediately to urgent care specialists responsible for further troubleshooting of the issue. The specialists analyze historical and current telemetry as well as diagnostics on the customer’s environment to help determine whether a remote fix is possible, or if an equipment failure requires subscriber contact or technician dispatch.

Our ECO Service Management™ optimizes the delivery and management of multi-play and connected home services while enhancing subscriber experiences. ECO Service Management includes a platform that enables the management of devices and services, integration with external systems, data collection, and application services as well as mission-critical service management applications that empower customer support, operations, and subscribers.

Achieving successful business transformation

Proactive service assurance is more than selecting the right software tools; a business transformation plan for developing new processes and organizational roles to deal with proactive support responsibilities is of equal importance.

To maximize the benefit versus cost of each solution deployment, the Service Experience Practice team at CommScope has developed a rigorous deployment lifecycle methodology, with a proven track record of success. By consulting closely with our customers to identify priorities and pain points, we ensure deployment is tailored to match your needs—quickly and effectively.

¹ [InfoGraphic] Results: Procera Networks’ Mobile Subscriber Experience Survey

Wi-Fi Service Assurance

For many consumers, Wi-Fi is the primary means of connecting devices to the home network—and is a determining factor in their perception of service quality. Service providers rely on Wi-Fi to deliver high-value services such as UHD to wireless set-tops. Ensuring reliable Wi-Fi performance, coverage and reliability throughout the home is of prime importance. Common problems like slow download/upload speeds, channel interference, security settings, and configurations are primary call drivers that consume resources and operating costs.

Wi-Fi Service Assurance is a key focus area at CommScope—together with its continued commitment to Wi-Fi quality through investing in CPE (customer premises equipment), solution design, and service practices.

Our Wi-Fi Service Assurance solutions are focused on key user roles: subscriber, technician, call center, and network operations center (NOC)/engineering—providing tools to configure, manage and diagnose increasingly complex service architectures to reduce operational and support costs and ultimately increase consumer satisfaction levels.

Our ECO Self-Service solutions with ECO Assist, ECO Collect and ECO Inquire create our web-based, on-demand, remote support solution, providing operational efficiencies and cost savings that extend from the gateway to the end customer’s desktop and apps.

Call center and technical support staff are able to resolve customer problems through a browser-based interface to the customer’s desktop. Powerful, interactive, permission-based features—combined with robust security and real-time reporting—deliver a customer care solution that improves support center efficiencies and creates happy customers.

Customer self-care using ECO Service Management™

Using a self-care portal or app powered by ECO Self-Service, customers can view their home network, be guided through common configuration tasks, receive notifications from their service provider, implement their own service quality tests, and potentially resolve their own problems.

The goal of the our Self-Care and Wi-Fi Assurance solutions is to provide a repeatable and predictable system that allows service providers to deliver the best possible Wi-Fi service experience while keeping operational costs under control. For this reason, the solution makes heavy use of automated logic; remote surveillance; CPE interrogation, visibility and troubleshooting tools; and a customization platform that enables a flexible system adaptable to the changing needs of service providers worldwide.

Why CommScope Assurance solutions?

Our Assurance solutions are designed to drive operational efficiencies throughout the service organization—from the back office to the customer’s home or business.

How it works:

CommScope Assurance solutions combine powerful software with our deep expertise in video and broadband delivery to help service providers unleash the power of data to prevent and solve performance issues. First, we help collect key performance information about your network and subscribers—centralizing it and making it available to the organizations and applications that rely on it. We then provide a platform for deep analytics, helping you unlock key insights about your network conditions and service quality, which can help guide sound decisions and prudent investments.

Solution components:

Provisioning

Quickly provisions and manages a wide range of customer gateways, peripherals and network elements.

Self-Care

Enables customers to manage their own account, service, and device preferences.

Outage management

Operates across the network—monitoring data with patented algorithms to detect service and subscriber impacting issues, delivering fault management, identifying root cause, and dispatching the right technician to the right location.

Network monitoring

Collects and analyzes data from access (network element), including DOCSIS®, PON, xDSL, access from the customer premises to the service provider serving network in hubs and central offices.

Reporting

Delivers key metrics resulting from the collection and analysis of network monitoring data. This data is exposed in multiple formats, based on the user role—such as the end customer, customer service representative (CSR), operations support, field technicians, and NOC/engineering—to deliver service and product management effectively.

Analytics

Answers questions based on multiple sources of data available from network devices, service campaigns, and even weather data—coming together to provide meaningful insights beyond the KPIs

Successful implementation is delivered with CommScope Deployment Services. Our experts work with you to tightly align with your operational goals, training/technical level of users, and operator-specific devices.

Business process analysis:

Our Professional Services organization includes experts in access network operations and Wi-Fi. To help operators optimize their strategy and execution, this team works on-site with your organization to create a plan for success based on proven methodologies.