John Linton
When we started Exetel, having had a fair amount of experience in setting up and operating several other ISPs, we put a lot of emphasis on the automation of all aspects of the business. This was easy enough to plan (starting from zero transactions is a whole lot easier than re-developing systems that are already in place) as we had a very clear idea of where the business was going to go and the sorts of volumes of different transactions we would generate as the business grew.
Our automation program has been very, very successful and allows Exetel to operate the business today with a fraction of the personnel that, as far as public information discloses, other ISPs are able to do. This improves the financial viability of the company as well as ensuring very precise information is provided to Exetel's customers as no 'human interpretation' is involved in a majority of those processes.
Very pleasing......except.......
Some 12 months ago we completed the automation of fault reporting which allowed an Exetel customer to register a fault experienced on their DSL, SHDSL, mobile, wire line or VoIP service 24 x 7 x 365. All the customer had to do was to dial the fault support number and use their telephone keypad to answer answer yes or no to a series of 4 - 8 questions (depending on the service). The automated system would then set up a fault ticket, advise by return automated telephone call what the fault ticket number was, register the fault with the carrier and then update the customer on progress by an automated voice message to their nominated contact number each 12 hours.
This automated process was a brilliant success. The vast majority of customers appreciated being able to log a fault by telephone any time of any day (rather than during business hours) and Exetel actually reduced the number of support personnel required to manage a continually growing customer base.
Everyone was happy - for a few months.
The downside to this level of efficiency and responsiveness was not evident until we had a visit from a senior manager from Telstra Wholesale who, during the operational review, pointed out that over the previous 12 months the number of faults per 1,000 customers reported by Exetel had gone from the lowest of the top 20 Telstra Wholesale ISP customers to the highest by a factor of 6 over what we had been lodging 12 months previously and to be more than double that lodged by the average of all other ISPs.
There was something clearly wrong and it was annoying our largest supplier and, when it was drawn to my attention, it seriously concerned me - firstly because I didn't want to annoy any supplier and secondly because it seemed to indicate that there was something going massively wrong with our network delivery services. At an internal meeting no-one could shed any light on what was happening and every analysis we did provided no insight in to what might be happening. Several people continued to try and find out what was happening over the next several days without any success at all.
Logic finally prevailed.
We were too efficient.
We came to the conclusion that by allowing our customers to log a service fault 'immediately' they experienced what the saw as an "Exetel Problem" rather than having to wait until the next business day to telephone Exetel and speak to a human to log their fault we had allowed customers who were experiencing a short term outage:
a) on their individual line
b) their ADSL port group at the exchange
c) the exchange itself
d) the backhaul from the exchange
e) or some CPE/their own operational problem which they would subsequently realise and fix themselves (or someone else in the household would return and fix)
to log a fault which would be already known to Telstra and would be fixed within a few hours as part of planned or unplanned maintenance.
To test this assumption we modified the process to hold all automatically logged faults logged for 8 hours before doing a simple, automated, test to see if we could see the user logged in and if we could we closed the fault.
The result was that 70% of total faults logged by the customer for ADSL1 services were resolved either by their own subsequent actions or by the actions of Telstra maintenance before any action on a fault lodged by Exetel on behalf of the customer could have started to have been investigated.
A great relief on both counts of concern.
We will continue to work on refining this process - the actions we took had a benefit of actually lowering the average fix time of reported faults - and will give more thought to the implementation of any such processes in the future.