How regional providers can increase customer satisfaction with smarter IP troubleshooting
The bar has been raised in the game of providing managed communication services to business customers. As companies go digital, connectivity gets more and more critical to business processes, and users demand better performance and more agile responses. The data network has become the arterial system of the business, and when it gets clogged, ischemia starts to shut processes down. Quick and determined action is crucial to keep the patient alive – and users satisfied.
Service providers are under increasing pressure to keep their customer’s networks performing at their top, 24x7, and need to swiftly and accurately address incidents that may occur. This is particularly challenging to regional providers, who have limited staff to investigate network events, and scarce resources to invest in sophisticated automation tools that could optimize network visibility and accelerate incident response.
Numerous tier-2 and tier-3 service providers have built their business success with a careful focus on the quality of service. Many of their customers feel like they are more relevant to a smaller regional player than to a gigantic tier-1. But to sustain this perception and keep those customers loyal, these providers need to offer the best-in-class response to service problems.
Numerous tier-2 and tier-3 service providers have built their business success with a careful focus on the quality of service. Many of their customers feel like they are more relevant to a smaller regional player than to a gigantic tier-1. But to sustain this perception and keep those customers loyal, these providers need to offer the best-in-class response to service problems.
When it is a physical incident, such as fiber ruptures or equipment failures, regional providers tend to have a solid record of speedy resolution. This is usually achieved through more agile and flexible processes and better efficiency of the field team, benefits of having a smaller scale. But when the issue concerns IP performance, the lack of advanced troubleshooting tools may impose a considerable drawback.
No trouble found got you down?
Business customers use constantly evolving IP and MPLS networks, with applications hosted on different clouds, traffic patterns that vary greatly through time, and often integrating multiple network providers. It is a complex set of ever-changing paths, hard to control and monitor. A connection interruption is certainly grave, but usually easy to diagnose and hence repair. Much more intricate is the erratic performance degradation that sometimes affects specific routes for a short period and later ceases or is masked by the dynamic routing protocols.
The customer gets a “no trouble found” return, feeling neglected and fearing that the same instability will happen again – maybe in an even worse episode.
Such events may come and go intermittently in the network, sometimes caused by a device or link instability, others because of temporary congestion on a route, or even due to abnormal application behavior, just to name a few possible causes. Users see a loss of performance in their connections and applications and open a trouble ticket, but when the network operation center goes to look at the problem, everything seems just fine. The customer gets a “no trouble found” return, feeling neglected and fearing that the same instability will happen again – maybe in an even worse episode.
Such situations are not minor for a service provider offering IP connectivity. We have seen providers reporting IP troubleshooting processes averaging 90 minutes of analysis, with over 80% resulting in a “no trouble found” response. It has a huge impact on customer satisfaction, SLA penalties, brand reputation, and NOC staff cost.
An innovative line of attack
Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, offers an innovative approach to IP/MPLS troubleshooting that solves this problem in a unique, simple and efficient way. Its Route Optimization and Assurance products (ROA) capture real-time IGP and BGP routing information from the network by acting as a passive router and listening to routing advertisements. This helps understand routing path changes and maintain an always-current Layer 3 topology model.
Through a 'network DVR' feature, users can “rewind and replay” the network’s routing behavior at the point in time when a problem occurred, providing a forensics solution for resolving transient and intermittent problems that frustrate customers. Network planning and simulation capabilities allow planners and engineers to interactively perform “what if” analysis, assuring changes and new service activations go smoothly. It means no more “flying blind”, but instead having the visibility to determine root cause of past problems and prevent their recurrence, as well as avoid future issues.
Source to destination routing path as captured by Blue Planet ROA
The impact of this solution in service providers’ networks and business is impressive. A large carrier told us they reduced unresolved tickets by 50% and the time to triage trouble tickets by 40%, saving 1,800 NOC hours per month. A service provider reported achieving 10x faster resolution of source-destination reachability problems. Another mentioned cutting SLA payouts by 37% using reports that showed customer-induced changes were accountable for several issues. Most testified being able to cope with significant subscriber and user growth without adding new resources. But the indisputable greatest benefit is the substantial gain in customer satisfaction. Results in every network will vary so check out our ROI calculator, located on the ROA Layer 3 Service Assurance website, to simulate possible cost savings for your network.
ROA is a vendor agnostic, software-based solution, extremely scalable and easy to deploy, which requires little or no professional services, making it cost-effective for any size IP network. This allows service providers with smaller networks and shallower pockets to begin their automation journey, taking advantage of the same tool that is transforming IP network planning, management and troubleshooting in over one hundred other providers including some of the world's largest network operators. By providing full visibility into their IP networks, Blue Planet ROA enables regional service providers to closely support the digital transformation of their business customers.
