10x the number of subscribers, 5x the number of networks and overhead down by 90% at the same time!
In 2016 an US supplier of advanced satellite-based connectivity to a niche market had fewer than 1000 subscribers. The services delivered to this customer were all based on a single network technology delivered by single satellite operator.
New management decided to actively pursue new customers, in part through adding new technologies by other terrestrial and satellite-based technologies.
In doing so they added 3 more satellite operators as well as terrestrial providers to their toolkit.
The propositions they developed implied that Local Area Networks (LAN) of their customers may be connected by more than one technology. As an example, depending on its location, an asset with a LAN on board may be connected via another private local network, GSM based LTE connectivity or any option of the Satellite based connectivity they currently have in their portfolio. Furthermore, depending on customer needs, different assets in a fleet may be using different technologies and providers.
So, what happens if a customer managing a larger fleet calls the support desk with a problem. Depending on the caller they may or may not have all relevant details to the type of communication equipment on board, the whereabouts and what the settings are related to the specific service delivered. More often than not this means that the customer support representative needs to open up and look into a number of different support systems to determine whether the query is related to a network issue, setting of the system/LAN or whether this was simply a matter of how the system was used.
In this case the first part has to do with network status or performance, the second has to do with internal systems of this particular system integrator and the third has to do with behavior of the crew or the passengers on board.
All of these may be relevant in answering to a customer query.
Having a number of sub-systems required to deliver the right -technical- support by your first- and second-line support staff implies that all your staff needs to be trained on all those different systems and that in order to troubleshoot they need to link and correlate the information provided by the different systems to come up with the right answer to a customer query.
The solution was to have an absolute user centric information system.
Based on the “endpoint” i.e. the local LAN one can immediately identify firstly which systems are on board, secondly which system/network was in use at a particular time or place and last but not least what type of traffic went over it, i.e. was it related to business operations, social media or software updates…
iVents netMonitoring and netAnalytics toolkits, in part developed based on Sandvine © technology were the foundation of this solution.
The customer now has a system with a highly intuitive graphical user interface allowing them to access and drill down on all data from any endpoint regardless of the technology or network used.
Furthermore, on some user levels the customer’s customers have detailed insights in part of the date via their own -proxy- portals as well.
The intuitive single user interface makes it a lot easier for the support staff to work with the systems implying less training required for new staff and quicker time to resolution for trouble tickets. This implies individual support staff is much more effective as they can handle many more customer requests.
And the customers are happy because they get their answers quicker.
The customer self-help tools and the internal efficiencies implied that iVent’s customer having grown their subscription base tenfold in the meantime could even reduce their support staff.
Their business is now scalable, way above market growth was realized, the support costs per subscription was reduced by 90% and margins both per user as well as overall have mushroomed.
For further reading please also refer to Monitoring and Analytics under Solutions.