Self Service Maintenance Tools

By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

Created: November 11, 1998

Note: For help designing/developing your self-service program or for developing tools to help you improve or implement such a program contact Birds-Eye.Net.

Overview:

An ever-present fact in the Internet business is that one must continue to grow its subscriber base. However, to insure profitability, one must begin to streamline customer activation and its technical support obligations by augmenting personnel with technology wherever possible. Figure 1.0 represents a complex sequence of events that each potential customer must experience. Today, Broadband operators must rely on its internal employees to process each phase of the customer care process. If unaltered, this single fact will continue to limit our ability to scale the business.

Figure 1.0 Customer Care Process 

The objective of this document is to re-examine the current direction one broadband operator is taking to provide subscriber maintenance tools and propose a new direction (based on the recent completion of a proof of concept). This successful proof of concept (Self Service Interface) is compared in the table below to the existing products (some of which are already deployed) to recommend the best long term strategy for MediaOne to continue to add self service functionality for its customers. 

For more information about the proof of concept refer to the document: Self Service Maintenance Proof Project 

Keys to Providing Useful Self Service Tools:

 To better understand the breakdown in customer care calls, one broadband operator's regions were recently surveyed (November 1998) to determine what portion of the calls were related to maintenance of email and mac addresses. 

 *Note that some regions do not register cable modem/pc MAC addresses so these only apply to LANCity two-way regions.

The addition of self service maintenance tools could save a good portion of the 1,509+ calls that Tier 2 received regarding email maintenance and 129+ calls received on MAC addresses each week.  

The relative costs associated with customer’s having to call in to have a customer care person perform this maintenance for them is shown in the table below. The following costs are associated typical numbers that one broadband operator was/is experiencing: 

Average call time: 12 minutes

Call cost $1.10 per min or $13.20 per call 

 Taking these numbers into next year would show an increase of both of these figures across the board. Currently the number of calls taken on email and mac address maintenance represents 2.5% of the total number subscribers. If we double or triple our total number of subscribers these numbers could potentially double or more.

 A closer examination of the products mentioned above are compared in the following table. In this table certain features of these products are evaluated on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is easy (considerably less difficult) and 5 is hard (considerably more difficult).

Comparison of Existing Products and Self Service Interface:

 * C++ code must be ported to NT platform, but this is doable.

** Solaris version in the works or already available.

*** Development would have the added benefit of giving Tier 1 access to this functionality

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