Trouble Ticketing Automation with Nextian
Nextian automates outage detection and resolution process for improved customer experience and effective allocation of support resources.
Nextian brings together:
- Accounts and account contacts
- Customer support cases/tickets
- Customer subscription services with physical element makeup and dependencies
- Element operational information: alarms, availability statistics, performance metrics and others
- Analytics determining impact of service elements’ performance on a service as a whole
All the above information is available directly in Salesforce without a need to leave the CRM.
Element vs. service status
Nextian service operational status (Up, Warning, Down) differs from element status. Service status is derived from individual element statuses, element dependencies and their roles in the service delivery.
Important For simple service types such as Internet access with a single CPE (Customer Premises Equipment), it seems sufficient to monitor only availability of the CPE (and achieve 1:1 relationship between service and dependent element). This however does not take outages other than CPE into consideration (e.g., a core router failure) and hinders ability for root-cause/parent-child case creation. |
To illustrate how Nextian works let’s consider the following scenarios:
- A SD-WAN service could be in Down or Warning status because the primary circuit is down and data is transmitted over the LTE. This may not be noticeable to the end user until LTE charges are seen on the bill.
- For a hosted virtual or a physical server, the server itself may be up, however a connection to the data center may be saturated, resulting in the Warning status for the service.
Service-based ticketing
Having service, service status and customer information in a single system makes implementation of advanced automation scenarios simpler compared to situations when network monitoring, ticketing and CRM are separated.
For example, Nextian supports the following scenarios out-of-the-box:
| Scenario | Description |
| Automatic case opened based on service operational status | Automatically open a case/ticket when a service is down due to failure of one or more underlying element. Notify support team, customer, account manager or even service reseller. Case immediately visible for account managers underneath the CRM account. |
| Automatic case closure based on service operational status | Automatically close a case when service is back on-line. Implement complex closure flows (e.g., ticket close after a timeout to handle intermittent problems). Notify support team, customer, account manager or even service reseller. |
| Bulk ticket create/close | When a single element impacts multiple services, corresponding cases can be opened in bulk. The cases can also be closed in bulk, when offending element becomes operational again. |
| Routing/triage based on service, customer, reseller and other information | Cases can be classified based on:
|
| Notification and escalation | Advanced notifications and escalations including account managers, service contacts or even resellers. |
Conclusions
Bringing customer, service, element and case/ticket information under the CRM umbrella enables easy implementation of advanced issue resolution scenarios.
These can streamline the resolution processes and immediately engage account management (by just keeping them informed or actively reaching out to customers) leading to better customer experience proper allocation of support resources.
Nextian is a vendor of Quote-to-Cash (QTC) software for cloud and communications helping providers accelerate growth and increase customer lifetime value.
Contact us today to find out how we can help you!
