The case of the invisible root cause: Satellite service providers and customer support calls

This is the second blog post in a series looking at the reasons service provider customers make support calls. Our first post was about the top 10 reasons customers make support calls. This time we will take a close look at satellite operators.

 

Why Satellite Operators are Different

When it comes to customer support calls, satellite service providers operate in different circumstances compared to other service providers. Satellite service delivery infrastructure and CPEs are different, and there is a service difference too:  video. In addition, contrary to wireline based service providers, satellite service providers did not make use of TR-069 to monitor the devices in subscriber homes.  In the past, these differences resulted in what we call “the invisible root cause”. The service and device differences made it more difficult to determine why end-users call and to support them. There was a root cause, only the CSR could not determine what it was.

Some of the reasons for the little insight into user CPEs are historical. In the past, Satellite providers used simple set top boxes, connected to the customers’ satellite dishes. These devices were not built and deployed to provide support information and, as mentioned before, did not make use of TR-069.

As services became more advanced, these relatively simple CPEs became more complex. To support VoD delivery (and other services), they connected to the home network. This is where the environment began changing. Connectivity enables additional services, but is also a great opportunity to provide better customer service, since data from the connected device can help resolve customer complaints.

Why visibility into device/service issues matters

From the support service center point-of-view, lack of visibility is when a customer calls a customer support representative, but the rep has little or zero visibility into the actual device/service. The inability to resolve issues hurts customer satisfaction and impacts the bottom line.  When best practices and re-boots fail, the rep will either send the customer to replace the set top box at a service center close by (or via mail) or send someone to check what the problem is (truck roll).

Exchanging one CPE for another is expensive. One (indirect) cost is to get the customer to travel to a service center/post office and send the old device and get another one instead. The other cost is refurbishing and checking the device, which can amount to tens of dollars.   The CPE replacement occurs despite the fact that satellite CPEs are very reliable hardware devices, and that the root cause may be a result of issues such as service infrastructure, signal quality or software configuration. Properly identified, these issues can be resolved easily – and the right remote management system can do just this.

Why do satellite subscribers call the customer service center?

Based on Jungo’s real life experience, the top five key complaints are:

1. Failed recordings
2. Signal issues
3. Audio / Video issues
4. Boot/Sys issues
5. Power issues

Together, our experience shows these top five reasons account for 60-70% of customer complaints.  In cases where newer services are offered, there are additional complaints, mostly VOD issues.

What’s more, we’ve seen cases where 75% of issues that brought on CPE replacement were eventually classified as “no fault found”.

Here are several examples of issues that can be resolved with the right tools, and that would otherwise result in a “no fault found”:

Signal strength and quality

Signal strength and quality are key performance indicators for the satellite provider. NDS CPE middleware is able to detect issues with signal strength and quality and to log the occurrence, so that anyone accessing the log (the customer rep in our case) can see meaningful data and not a log of accurate but irrelevant information. Jungo’s Panorama remote management system can then periodically collect the information from the CPE logger. In this case, when the customer calls, the information is already there for the customer rep to review, even in cases which the signal is OK at the time of the customer call.

The information presented over Panorama provides per tuner or per frequency views, so that Customer Service reps can determine whether the root cause is hardware related (tuner) or frequency/signal related.  The support rep can easily view if there is a trend in the events that is associated with specific frequency.  In addition, cross device problems per certain areas/devices can be detected in this manner. This mechanism highlights situations where the customer set top box is part of a group of devices that currently suffer from similar signal issues.

Failure to record:

With visibility into customer CPE, addressing issues such as failure to record – a common customer complaint – becomes simple. Panorama tracks all recorded events: successful, failed and partial recordings, with a record that explains the two latter ones.

By showing the support rep the DVR information and history, the support rep can see a disk write failure, a booking moved, a WAN connection loss, a no card detected, a power failure etc. As a result, the CSR can provide better service to the subscriber and resolve the issue.

HDMI Issues:

Alerts such as an incompatible tv model can be viewed by the customer support rep and addressed over the phone.

Conclusion

Deployed on millions of devices, Panorama provides useful information and tools to multiple groups within the service provider organization. For Customer Service Centers Panorama offers an Intuitive top-down view, comprehensive information on the user environment, root cause analysis and a customizable interface.

Some of the detailed information made available by panorama is

• STB detailed information
• Visibility into the home network, as well as the history of system alerts and an activity log
• Panorama displays rich information about main complaint scenarios: on screen display, boot history etc

The capabilities of Panorama allow the customer service rep to see issues that were invisible before and that are common in satellite service provider customer support calls. This reduces calls, truck rolls and CPE replacements.

By roni in Blog on July 16, 2012