Another year means another set of hurdles to overcome as telecom industry trends call for field service effectiveness.
Those in the telecom industry know that keeping things in working order is of the utmost importance to their customers. That’s because a single telecom provider can be responsible for the livelihood of countless businesses that rely on functioning networks to carry out every day processes and transactions.
It’s then no surprise that as network access continues to be a sticking point for almost all organizations and individuals, trends in customer service and fast service turnaround times are the predominant concerns for the industry.
Telecom Service Availability and Customer Expectation Shifts Point towards Field Service Importance
Easily the most pressing problem for telecommunications field service organizations is being able to fill the gap between available field technicians and customer service needs. This conflict leads to a number of issues:
- A fragmented view of assets across lines of businesses without tracking capabilities
- Trouble-ticketing platforms are disparate and information flow is not consolidated
- Fragmented view of service orders and fulfillment
- Network operations, technicians, and network alarm management platforms are fragmented across technologies and are difficult to detect and manage outages
As customer expectations in the telecom industry continue to grow, it’s these service issues that bring on the trends most apparent in 2015.
1. Network Service Turnaround Time is First Concern for both Providers and Customers
Telecoms have up until now treated field service organizations as cost centers; field technicians engaged in maintenance activities were just the cost of doing business. But as more organizations have come to rely on telecom services this thinking has changed. Field service is now the most important part of avoiding downtime and upholding network performance.
Telecommunications businesses have evolved to the point that traditional contact channels have disappeared and many customers never meet a live customer representative. As such, field technicians have become the face of the company and in most cases the only company representative allowed onto the premises. The impression left by these visits contributes to the customer’s perception of the network quality and competency. In an industry where downtime is the greatest enemy, focusing on customer convenience and service windows is the next step.
2. Increased Customer Expectations for Service
The evolution and convergence of technologies have blurred the lines that once separated telecoms players from the world of information technology, and the two sectors are on a collision course. This is especially true in wireless companies as mobile broadband subscribers will increase tenfold, reaching 3 billion in the next 5 years.
Many telecoms are actively trying to make use of their existing scale and IT savvy to move beyond basic voice and data services and begin selling IT services. A number of telecoms have recently acquired IT companies in order to drive growth in ICT services and related network areas. This of course is in combination with emerging IoT, quick payment, and mobile app ecosystem dominance.
All of these quadrants depend on the telecom service as a platform of operation. As these services continue to become more and more prevalent it will be more than expected that they are in operation at all times. It is up to telecom organizations to meet this expectation.
3. Service Departments Get Asked to Do More with the Same Resources
As they start to profit less, telecoms are keeping a close watch over the cost side of operations. Without visibility into field operations in other parts of the organization, executives assume that the field work force is underutilized or at the very least inefficient, resulting in continuing pressure to do more with the existing resources in place.
Much of the pressure is a natural result of poor visibility into field activities and performance managements. Without metrics to support otherwise, telecom executives almost automatically assume that the field force is underutilized and can withstand additional workloads.
Even in top performers, operations managers are being asked to increase capacity without a corresponding increase in budgets. It’s only with performance measurement or reporting the quality of service delivered on networks that organizations can properly gauge service department capabilities.
Constant Dependence on Networks Adds Performance Pressure to Telecom Field Service Teams
The fact remains that those in the telecom industry are under more pressure than ever as networks become the platform for countless services and outages continue to be panic scenarios for providers. With a service management solution, telecoms can prioritize service so field technicians can get more done in less time. It’s only with effective field service performance that organizations can get an upper hand on the trends and create true reliability.
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