WHITEPAPER / JANUARY 2014

End-to-End Ticketing for Care

Attaining customer satisfaction

through intelligent analytics

Myles Kennedy, Product Consultant – REV2

Introduction Customer Care has historically evolved as an adjunct to other business concerns. Despite the fact that Care is a key customer contact point for Operators, there is an extremely high degree of difficulty associated with establishing an informed dialog. The expanded customer offering has resulted in the Services themselves becoming increasingly complex, with the infrastructure in place to support operations following suit. Hindered by a crippling maze of esoteric coding and processes, many operators today face the challenge of relying on workflows spanning multiple ticket systems. They are finding that operations suffer in the areas of Customer Communications, Detecting and Fixing Issues, Achieving Closures, and the ability to support Organizational Learning. Useful troubleshooting information is often split across multiple locations, so it is difficult to coordinate collaborative cross-function activities and research. As Figure 1 shows, multiple ticket systems contribute to problems in three areas:

1. Between front-end and back-end systems (hand-off problems, HO), causing operations to slow down and increasing the risk of information loss.

2. Between parallel channels (cross-channel problems, CH), where customers may end up in an incorrect channel initially and experience problems as they get moved to other channels at a later stage.

3. Between ticketing systems where it is desired to be able to perform some form of problem

correlation (correlation problems, CX).

Figure 1: Key problem areas with multiple ticket systems.

Given the above, we need a simple method to effectively track the customer journey through services while allowing for timely communication with the customer. Using principals from Customer Journey Mapping (see sidebar) we developed a single resource that will be used as the main point to capture dialog known as End-to-End Ticketing.

Drivers of End-to-End Ticketing

The raison d'être for end-to-end ticketing is that it allows a consistent Customer Care dialog. It supports the requirements of an informed, responsive and comprehensive communication with customers engaged through Care. Effective communications require active listening. This means not only being able to fully capture and understand customer incidents they themselves report, but also being sensitive to incidents that occur that the customer may not yet be aware of. This includes being prepared to warn customers ahead of potential problems, something Operators have typically shied away from doing and which marks a significant change in perspective when it comes to engaging in these dialogs. Customers depend on Operators for solutions to complex problems they often don’t understand and which are hard to describe. The End-to-End ticket provides value here in three ways:

1. It enables customers to get the solutions they need, regardless of the method they employ to interact with operators: by phone, online via email or chat, or in stores.

There is a good analogy with the shipping industry. Although it is now common practice to arrange your shipment entirely online, you have the options of walking into a shop or making arrangements on the phone. Supporting multiple channels, including the subsequent publishing of status updates (via a specific medium and with varying levels of granularity) goes a long way to differentiate competitors in this market.

2. “Complex” tickets almost always require a handoff from a primary (front-line) agent to a

secondary (back-line) agent. This typically has high risk for information being lost and customers having to furnish it again. Handoffs also result in increased turnaround time from the customer’s perspective, particularly in scenarios where there are delays in getting a secondary agent to make contact. Advanced customers anticipate this, and will tend to be frustrated by having to initially be processed by a front-line.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Mapping is a technique where the service provider puts themselves in the customer’s shoes in order to understand all touch points where the customer is engaged through the customer lifecycle. It is intended to help identify those ‘critical moments of truth’ that occur, and identify where service improvements can be achieved. It is fundamentally about stepping back to actively design the moments where there is customer interaction, from the perspective that matters most: the customer’s. It ultimately allows the Operator to follow a script during customer engagements. The script takes into account customer’s actions, their motivations, questions and the barriers they might encounter.

An end-to-end ticket helps streamline this activity. It preserves pertinent information and helps to minimize customer frustrations when their problem is handed-off.

3. By ensuring that a shared ticket is made available throughout the operations chain, the ticket itself becomes the logical place to store relevant information that is typically used to support troubleshooting activities. Each division in the Operations chain has traditionally turned to its own set of reports and tools to perform its function. An end-to-end ticket provides an opportunity to leverage these information silos and practices throughout the interaction.

One common scenario today is that work orders are prepared as blank sheets of paper. Engineers set out with a basic idea of the customer’s problem but tend to start diagnostic analysis from scratch. Fortunately, the ability to pre-load work orders with relevant intelligence has been shown to dramatically improve the hit rate of work orders. It is common practice for some Operators to do this type of preparation for repeat work orders, where the importance of success becomes that much more critical.

A Definition We can define an End-to-End ticket as one master ticket spanning the lifecycle of the interaction. It starts with the occurrence of an incident, whether the Operator detects this incident themselves or the impacted customer contacts us about it. The ticket ends when the incident is resolved, this being achieved when our testing confirms it is solved and we have allowed a decay timer to expire. The ticket is used by any front-line (customer-facing) system or staff. This includes Care agents, but also automated systems such as the IVR which can have its behavior modified with respect to messaging to the customer.

What Should be Included in the End-to-End Ticket? There is much available information in the organization that might be selected for inclusion in an end-to-end ticket. It is important to ensure that this information is presented in a level of detail and language that is usable by the agents. Throughout the workflow, the agent in communication with the customer at any particular point in time must be able to interpret and use this information to support their dialog. The following list is not exhaustive, but provides a sample of the type of information to consider. Of course, each customer environment will bring its own requirements.

Core Ticket Information Ticket, Customer, Account and Subscribed Services Events DVR Plays and Errors VOD Purchase Events, Plays and Errors STB Aggregator Events CDR Events CM Events (including change events, flap reports, etc). IVR ‘arrival’ events IVR ‘progress’ events Bill Payments

Request-for-Credit events

Provisioning Events (Services, Devices, IDs) Customer Configuration Change events Interactions Web portal logins (customer search topics) Customer Self-Care Logs Customer Contact History Situational Awareness Top-10 reporting for reboots, etc. Service Outage Data (posted outage events and related status events) Social Media Events Marketing Activities Telemetry Realtime house poll results Realtime Neighborhood poll results Network: Node health status Key Operational Metrics

Implementing an End-to-End Ticket System To implement an End-to-End ticket system, you will typically need to follow these seven steps:

1 Create a key stakeholders working group that brings together representatives from each of the contact points and contributors to the end-to-end ticket content.

2 Understand the customer journey. To do this, conduct customer research, preferably using ethnographic-style interview techniques and in-context observations in place of surveys and focus groups, which tend to not deliver the relevant detail critical to understanding customer experience.

3 Conduct a Business Process Analysis to understand the workflow within the organization and where the delta exists between this and an ideal Customer Journey experience. Start documenting and testing use-cases.

4 Rationalize codes and terminology used across the organization. Leverage best practices and available industry information architectures in these areas. Techniques such as CHU modeling (see sidebar) can be employed to ensure that the cross-channel requirements are fully captured and the information modeling is robust enough to support all use cases.

5 Audit and agree on what information to include in the tickets, including available telemetry, customer account and billing data, outage, service performance and marketing information. Consultation with the data owners in respective areas will reveal what data they rely on for troubleshooting, their rules of thumb, and best practices approaches. Cross-functional workshops to share and assimilate this information are a good approach to facilitate data gathering, analysis and sharing.

6 Continue testing use-cases, paying careful attention to the flow assumptions and what information is being used (the field list).

7 Unify ticketing process into one system across the operation. Approaches will vary, but typically this will involve the introduction of a new ticketing system as the preferred approach. Evolution of an in-place system may prove complex, depending on the degree to which it is constrained by existing coding and processes.

Guiding Principles We’ve developed three guiding principles when considering the requirements for an end-to-end ticketing solutions. 1. The customer’s time is valuable. Operators should acknowledge and respect this fact and do their best to make efficient use of their time. In many cases, the customer has had to make time to contact the Operator due to something occurring beyond their control. However, it is important to take into consideration how this impacts before, during and after the contact. A simple example is the ease with which customers can find the Operator’s contact details, and whether they need to provide additional information (such as an account number) before the engagement starts. For a customer, the greatest impact to their contact time is often when their issue requires a hand-off from one contact to another. It is vital that the internal handoffs are efficient. The agents must take care to ensure that customer’s expectations are managed and that they engage in effective listening to capture the customer’s story the first time it is told. 2. The customer has a pre-conceived expectation that the operator is reasonably in control of both the network and service offering. For the customer, this translates into the perception that the Operator is both aware of and able to fix the problem. However, this requires intelligent use of information available to the Operator, including the use of telemetry, customer history and configuration records. It further requires smart hand-offs between various parties and care must be taken to ensure that the pertinent information remains in focus at each engagement. 3. Operators need to acknowledge that customers are ultimately human, and that they will initiate contact in a manner and medium of their choosing. This not only implies that there should be a variety of contact channels, but that Operators should aim to ensure that the contact channels offer equal capabilities in terms or issue resolution. Furthermore, it becomes essential that a dialog initiated via a particular channel can be seamlessly picked up and progressed from another channel. End-to-end ticketing supports this by ensuring that there is a single capture point for the customer’s story that can be managed. This increases hand-off efficiency through the enforcing of common standards, processes and use of information.

CHU Modeling

A CHU Model is a model for helping design a pervasive Information Architecture by allowing examination of the requirements from the perspectives of: Channels, Heuristics, & User-Tasks. Channels represent the communication paths which need to be supported by the Information Architecture. User-Tasks are the micro and macro tasks where there exist touch-points with the Information Architecture. Heuristics are “rules of thumb” for the evaluation of each Channel/Task intersection.

[Pervasive Information Architecture, Resmini & Rosati]

The ticket is able to incorporate relevant telemetry, history and configuration in one place and make it universally visible to all parties through the service chain. This minimizes the dependency on and use of data silos and proprietary information. If key information is available to support troubleshooting, this can be made available via the ticket from the start of the process. This enables all parties to work smarter and breaks down barriers to cross-department interactions.

Soft Benefits The introduction of end-to-end ticketing also brings with it a number of soft benefits, particularly in the areas of staff development and staff turnover reduction. Customer Care professionals derive job satisfaction through their ability to help customers resolve their problems. Staff happiness can thus be improved and turnover can be reduced by allowing participants a more holistic view of the service workflow, where each participant has visibility into their contributions to the process. Along with exposing value-add, this has the reciprocal benefit of reducing the tendency to throw issues over the wall and reduce caste formation between groups. The end-to-end ticket allows staff visibility beyond the “wall”. This allows staff to better appreciate the impact of their actions, including for how delays and errors are propagated through the service process. From a staff development perspective, increased availability of information makes it possible for staff to, at various points in the workflow, actively expand their knowledge through context-based learning. This makes it more feasible to both move resources between groups and provide more options for staff to progress their own careers.

Conclusion As we move from a world where isolated support silos are merged, the use of more sophisticated IT will undoubtedly play a key role allowing Operators to improve their dialog with customers. Speaking the same technical language and using a common script throughout the organization is a fundamental requirement to ensuring a consistent dialog across divisions. To ensure satisfied customers, the organization needs to continually strive to meet and exceed customer expectations. Expectations are shaped by all kinds of outside forces, internal and external, and the Operator needs to constantly seek to negotiate these through their interactions with the customer, utilizing their fine-tuned skills to avoid emotional states in favor of collaboration and resolution. An End-to-End ticket allows Operators to manage these interactions. It ensures that they can intelligently leverage the wealth of information available within the organization to improve customer service. At the same time it facilitates a structured approach to learning from - and improving - these processes moving forward. From here, we can build a solid foundation for future innovations targeted at simplifying the customer journey and improving the customer experience.