Immediate payoff from automation investments is essential, and tools such as AXTRACT and AXWIFI provide substantial benefits to existing customer service and service quality operations, in addition to laying the foundation for full automation.

Front line customer service is the immediate beneficiary of greater visibility on performance at the network edge, by positioning level 1 and level 2 support staff to better respond to emerging customer issues. Many of the automation tools described above can be used in reactive mode to assist customer service staff in handling calls.

Fault prediction and diagnosis models developed for automation can be integrated with the customer service agent dashboard to provide more sophisticated tools to facilitate complicated and difficult parts of the agents workflow. These are particularly beneficial as, when service calls come in, the fault which triggered them is often no longer present and it may be difficult to recreate the conditions that led to it.

For example many problems may occur during high traffic evening hours but may not be reported until the next day or later and at a different time when the WiFi environment and network traffic can be vastly different. With access to detailed historic data and sophisticated diagnostic tools, call centre staff can more easily understand exactly what was happening at the time the fault arose and diagnose the problem much more quickly and reliably.

WiFi issues in particular are challenging  to resolve via a service call as issues such as conflicts with neighboring networks over allocation of appropriate channels are often impossible to recreate. But with access to the historic data and sophisticated algorithms to diagnose problems and recommend solutions, the customer service agent can ensure the settings of the router can be adjusted to minimize the risk of recurrence and the associated frustration and cost of repeat service calls.

The AXTRACT and AXWIFI systems provide all of the functionality required for many of the network monitoring and reactive and proactive customer service actions described above through a range of built-in dashboards and analytical tools. These can be used stand-alone or integrated with existing customer service portals.

Examples of individual customer dashboards / tools : AXTRACT and AXWIFI

From this blog series: