Service providers and their customers often suffer from poor experiences because of weak, isolated management systems that do not deliver strong management control. This lack of integrated operational support systems (OSS) creates complexity as issues are attempted to be resolved and causes disconnects in service response leading to sub-optimal customer experience (CX).
What service providers want are robust, integrated management systems that give them the freedom to manage their UcaaS offering and support their customers effectively with efficient tools that aid the process and help them to maintain compliance with service level agreements (SLAs).
Tools to quickly diagnose
“We provide integrated tools like VoIP Monitor to quickly diagnose and resolve issues,” explains Aydin Yamalioglu, the Head of Technology Pre-Sales and Support at NetSapiens International. “This enables our customers and their resellers to do the first-line of support, allowing them to maintain their own SLAs, improve their customer support and help build relationships.”
VoIP Monitor is a feature of NetSapiens’ SNAPsolution that enables customers to look deeply into all details of an issue and to find the root causes behind it. Giving service providers and their resellers the ability to diagnose and resolve issues themselves thus helping boost customer satisfaction.
“If someone calls up or raises a ticket, you want to get a resolution immediately,” explains Yamalioglu. “Having the VoIP Monitor integrated into our application means if an issue needs to be raised to NetSapiens, we’re able to find the fault very quickly, mainly due to the service providers having the ability to do the first and second line support. ”
“Nine times out of ten, it’s a problem they can resolve, because it’s an issue with the local network or something within their remit to resolve,” he adds. “We give service providers the ability to self-serve. Our philosophy is always to let our partners solve at the point of demand.”
Customer management complexities
Intuitive and easy-to-use platforms should be a baseline requirement for handling the complexities of customer management and are the foundations for excellent CX. This is essential in order to enable customers with the ability to manage parts of their service. However, customers should not be forced to manage aspects that they are not capable of or don’t feel comfortable with.
NetSapiens has therefore developed its platform to manage how much access customers are given depending on their experience and comfort level.
“It’s a simple process from a tiered approach that works its way along the chain, whether it’s customers or resellers having access to the platform,” explains Yamalioglu. “This ensures a very similar experience all the way down through the hierarchy, there’s just a little less visibility. When you’re walking a customer through it, you are able to see what they’re experiencing so, from the management point of view, you’re not working the magic in the background and there’s no man behind the curtain.”
It’s up to the service provider how much they allow customers to do and to what extent they support customers own service management. “The solution we offer can be fully white-labelled not just for the service provider, but down to their resellers levels, including the reseller’s branding, such as logos and colour schemes, even using their own URLs and email accounts for things like invites and voicemail-to-email,” adds Yamalioglu. “This is done in a very simple way, without the requirement of needing inhouse HTML / CSS experts.”
The killers for operations
The difficulties involved in fault-finding highlight the need for integrated systems like NetSapiens’ SNAPaccel (managed infrastructure-as-a-service) offering. NetSapiens integrated tools provide the service provider’s engineering and support teams with the insight to where the fault resides, and subsequently, get it solved faster.
“Nine out of ten problems can be solved relatively easily, with little effort,” says Yamalioglu. “But it’s that one problem that is nuanced and has a root cause that could be down to a myriad of reasons, many outside of the service providers control, that kills operations’ performance. These issues are extremely time consuming and resource heavy but what NetSapiens provides, gives the service provider the ability to find that needle in the haystack very quickly.”
Provisioning issues
Yamalioglu gives the example of provisioning issues, which are typically to do with handsets. Due to the pandemic lockdowns of the past 18 months, there have been a lot of challenges with providers unable to go to a site and provision.
“With the SNAPaccel solution, you have all your options directly available to you,” he says. “If you need a softphone on your device, you click down and login and you have a softphone. Need a receptionist to work from home? There’s a receptionist console. Need to run a video conference or webinar? It’s just a click away on your browser with no installations required.”
In addition to its support team and offering trailblazing tools to resolve issues, NetSapiens provides high-quality documentation, training videos, and customer training to support customers and resellers.
