As CSPs, we may have several outsourced functions in our customer operations. These are typically Call Centers, Field Services and some Billing functions such as dispatching. As these functions are run by different companies, we only have a partial visibility of the quality of their operations. Since , any delay or inconsistency will directly impact the perception of the customer, we have to monitor the performance of these functions very carefully.
There are SLAs (OLAs) that are in place with these vendors and most of the times the provider has no visibility over the services given by the outsourced company. Trouble tickets are generally the only measure to take into account , packed by additional KPIs that are sent by the outsourced company. (and of course these are manipulated some times..)
How OSS can help in this field? There are several solutions that we can come up with. First category is the robotics tools, that can run a specified scenario(called as script) over a specified channel. For call centers, this could be automatically calling IVR at random times, press some buttons and try to reach a CSR. All the response times are recorded for further review. For billing, another bot can OCR the printed bill and compare it with the data in the billing system (or a revenue assurance solution). Any inconsistencies, again will be recorded. At the end of the monitoring period, these records would be used for reconciliations between the measures the outsourced company sends, and the measures we get.
A robotics solution even more meaningful while we are moving to external cloud infrastructures. I have mentioned about robotics solutions in my previous post Application Performance Managers. Investing in such a solution in our CEM strategy will bring many improvements in end to end business processes area.