One thing that has become crystal clear is that Service Providers are continually working to find better ways to provide tools to their field and maintenance technicians. Over the last couple of years the industry has seen solutions like Predictive Plant Maintenance take off because of efficiencies gained and percentages decreased in the meantime to recovery (“MTTR”) for noise related issues. While companies will continue digitizing business workflows for remote workers and will continue to adopt location intelligence-based tools, there’s still room for improvement. A good example of this is the evolution to utilizing QoE tools to give field technicians more visibility into network performance.
Within the last few months enabling QoE metrics to be tracked and posted on SmartPins has allowed the following benefits:
- Awareness of drifting nodes – This means that field technicians and NOCs can both see when field equipment is drifting down, which could result in poor experience for customers or even outages if the drift drop low enough.
- Location awareness – Giving these same technicians the ability to see the nodes visually on a map and the levels of QoE results in a “heat map” like view.
- QoE checks – Equally important is that now field technicians can not only troubleshoot network issues, but they can test the QoE to validate issues are resolved. Said another way field technicians can trigger a QoE check anywhere in the field versus “assuming” things are fixed and waiting to see if more ticket come in.
- Predictive analytics – Another option is to utilize the combination of historical data, recent trending data and/or planned event(s) data to predictive forecast which nodes will drift below a threshold result in a ticket before the issue has become a problem.
Simply said, new technologies are enabling service providers to “fix it before it becomes a customer affecting problem.” The results without real-time QoE were around a 20% improvement in efficiencies gained. With QoE added to the equation we don’t have numbers yet, but from talking to service providers that have done trials, the results are expected to show this will be a “game changer.”
In summary why continue to rely on delayed communications from NOCs and tools with limited awareness of location + QoE? There are solutions that have proven ROI in less than one year, and equally important empower field technicians to do better work and deliver faster results that ultimately result in more satisfied customers.