Trouble Ticketing Automation with Nextian

Nextian Salesforce package adds Quote-to-Cash (QTC) capabilities for cloud and communications providers (Product Management, CPQ & Sales, Order Management & Delivery, Service Management) to the standard Salesforce CRM.

Nextian RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) adds an integration with existing NMS/RMM/APM/Observability systems to bring network and infrastructure monitoring information into the CRM.

Together, both packages enable cloud & communications providers to:

Have substantive conversations with customers by providing key service information such as availability, usage, capacity forecasts and others directly in the CRM.
Continuously examine customer services and their elements to automatically identify potential upgrade opportunities.
Leverage service-level alarms and availability to easily implement ticketing automation.

As a result, Nextian platform can be used to build complex ticketing automation and resolution processes such as:

Ticket creation/closure based on service outage.
Customer status updates via email and customer portals.
Opening vendor tickets for third-party provided services and elements (eBonding).

Nextian service management module links service and element information with standard Salesforce Sales Cloud or Service Cloud cases so they can serve better for incident management purposes / as trouble tickets.

Salesforce case with service and account information

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 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 operational and fulfillment statuses

A holistic approach to establishing service status enables better ticketing automation than traditional solutions based on individual router or CPE monitoring.

Service-based ticketing automation

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/ticket creation based on service operational status	Automatically open a case/ticket when a service is down due to failure of one or more underlying elements. Notify support team, customer, account manager or service reseller. Case immediately visible to account managers underneath the CRM account.
Automatic case/ticket 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 service reseller.
Bulk ticket create/close	When a single element (such as a core router or a DNS server) 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: Service features such as product (VMs issues are assigned team A, colocation to team B, Internet Access to team C) or service location Business impact such as associated service revenue $, total account revenue $, total channel partner revenue $, etc. Any other data points that are available in the CRM (e.g., $ amount on opportunities in the pipeline for the account)
Notification and escalation	Advanced notifications and escalations including account managers, service contacts or even resellers.

Conclusions

Bringing customer, service, element structure, operational status and case/ticket information under the CRM umbrella streamlines issue resolution for customer support and network operations teams.

It also allows account management teams to stay informed via the CRM and proactively reach out to customers in case of outages leading to better customer experience.

Integration of NMS/RMM/APM/Observability with CRM and support cases enables easy implementation of trouble ticketing automation scenarios both with customers and vendors.

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!