Vendor management for telecoms networks

 

Complex networks

Organizations, especially large multinationals and unified communication providers have complex telecommunications networks. There is often a strong desire to reduce the number of partnerships with carriers or to simplify these relationships. For such networks, vendor management is a crucial aspect of maintaining successful operations. This process empowers organizations to take the measures necessary to control cost, reduce plausible risks, ensure strong deliverability of service and derive value from suppliers in the long-run.

 

Vendor management

The Spearline user community recognizes that their telecoms network is a mission-critical customer communications channel. Many have developed very impressive methodologies to leverage the Spearline platform and objectively measure carrier performance. This ensures that they are being provided with the highest quality of service at all times.

Spearline customers can use the data and information provided to them through the platform to create an accurate and reflective record of each carrier’s performance. Many create a league-table which allows each carrier to understand its respective position in terms of performance. Each month the carriers are notified of their ranking and a discussion is opened on how to improve their position. This helps to ensure a stronger relationship between the carrier and its customer. Using these, providers can be benchmarked against previous performance and against one another. This means that irrespective of a carrier’s size or the volume of numbers held with a carrier, they still have the potential to be identified as the best performing supplier for the organization.

 

Quality of service

If the carrier is not willing to ensure a better quality of service, they are potentially risking their contract with the customer. This means that there are inherent benefits for both the customer and carrier in ensuring that their ranking is as high as possible. This shows that the carrier truly values the customer relationship and is willing to work hard to ensure that quality and stability are provided. With reports of all call failures and poor audio quality alerts being recorded, it becomes easy to keep track of such information and have it readily available when necessary.

In addition to this objective measure of performance, some companies include subjective estimates of how each carrier is performing. This is based on measures such as how helpful the carrier’s support desk is and their ability to assist in problem situations.

Almost every company globally is trying to ensure that its costs remain as low as possible, while ensuring the best quality of service. Spearline helps organizations to place a monetary value on any interruptions which occur to their service. This is done through providing complete details about call issues and duration. This information combined with ticket details and customer complaints, enables companies to demonstrate the impact of such disturbances on their business. These negative impacts can often be felt through lowered revenue streams, loss in brand credibility and customer loyalty, along with higher levels of customer churn.

 

 

Zero tolerance

Spearline partners with newly onboarded customers to understand their pain points, approach to ticketing and the volume of these. Spearline works with organizations to ensure a zero tolerance approach to telecoms issues. This means that every problem should lead to the generation of a ticket. Previously, when an organization possessed only fragmented information about a specific event, these tickets were often returned with a “no fault found” status. This occurred because while carriers maintain records of everything that occurs in their networks within their log files, these logs are usually only maintained for a short period before they enter into a looped cycle, where data gets overwritten with new, fresher data. This is an essential process for carriers as they have unimaginable amounts of data being recorded.

However, when an issue arises and an organization submits a ticket, this enters a queue system before it is handled. This means that if the ticket is not reported and handled prior to the data being overwritten, then the investigation may be inconclusive as the carrier is unable to identify root-cause. This can be very frustrating for the organization, especially when it comes to issues which could have a significant impact on their customers. Spearline provides Call Detail Records (CDRs) and event recordings for every test call, these enable Spearline’s customers to go directly to their providers with the relevant log details e.g. start time down to the millisecond. This means that problem resolution can occur quicker and with a significantly greater level of success. 

The above shows that Spearline is not only a quality management tool, but can and should be a key component of telecoms vendor management. Spearline puts the power into the hands of their customers.

 

Why Spearline?

If you are new to Spearline and would like to find out more about how you can benefit from the platform, we would love to speak with you. Please send us a brief message, and we will be in contact with you shortly.

Spearline's platform proactively tests inbound telecommunications services, as well as dial-out. Connectivity and audio quality are monitored on fixed-line, SIP, or mobile networks, globally. Spearline enables organizations to provide uninterrupted services to customers around the world. For further information, or if you have any further questions .