Maximizing revenue and operational efficiencies
for optimum enterprise success.
Business Obstacle
During 1998, 1999 and early 2000, Covad Communications was experiencing rapid growth resulting in new untrained engineers/technicians both internally and within partner network operational environments. Partner NOC engineers and technicians were overwhelming the Covad Technical Assistance Centers with excessive call volume and erroneous customer trouble tickets. The partner NOC technicians did not have the diagnostic tools to effectively work with their customers to interactively define the root cause of the possible service interruption. Trouble tickets would be created, the customer would disconnect from the call, followed by a call to the Covad TAC for assistance. Frustration existed for the customer, the partner NOC teams and the Covad TAC team. With each trouble ticket estimated to cost $100, the elimination of erroneous trouble tickets would provide significant savings for Covad and improve customer satisfaction for end users/partners.
Skills Utilized
Teamwork and Leadership
Project Management
Business Problem Resolution
New Technology Creation
Business Process Engineering
Budget Management, Financial Acumen
Operational Focus
Resolution Accomplished
Action Implemented:
#1. Working interdepartmentally, created a cross functional agreement with the NOC, OSS Engineering, Sales/Marketing and others to articulate most urgently required applications, based upon customer input, operational expense impact and the level of effort required to create the function.
#2. Established an OSS concept creation team within the TAC Engineering team to define software enhancements, required for logical evolution of existing systems. These development modules included feature functionality and page layouts, thereby effectively communicating with OSS Engineering team the customer facing experience required for success. Working from a prioritized list of system enhancements, we were assured of addressing the customer wish list and the most significant operational expense impacting issues first.
Results Obtained:
Implementation of over 70 new tools allowed the partner NOC technicians to more frequently identify the root cause of the customer problem while the customer was reporting the issue. The new tools reduced partner call volume to the Covad TAC and lowered total trouble ticket volume by over 7,000 per month. In addition, the quality of the legitimate tickets actually opened increased with accurate information captured thereby reducing Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) by over 20%.
Operational expense savings, September 2000 = $700,000.
