Trouble Ticketing (TT) systems
A Trouble Ticket system is one of the initial problem tracking systems deployed in a VOIP network. It is crucial that the system be utilized to categorize issues so that they help in tying them back to specific vendors and partner service providers. A logging and alerting mechanism should be in place so that systemic issues can identified and rectified. Also the system should help drive better customer satisfaction and uptime.
Identifying and stream lining the categories of trouble tickets
The trouble ticketing system should be developed such that it captures the relationship between the user reported problems or proactive trouble tickets to the service uptime.
The geographic reporting should be captured in the trouble ticket along with detail information about the type of problem being reported. If it’s a voicemail related problem being reported for market A or a particular campus then the location, and the type of problem should be captured as a tag. This tagging would facilitate post analysis for correlation to reported alarms and also the vendor product.
Correlating of the TT back to the Service uptime
The customer experience can be deduced through effective tracking of trouble tickets. Following key practices centering on Trouble Ticket system will help reducing down time and improve customer satisfaction.
- A continuous network availability tracking in the trouble ticketing system, by logging user downtime.
- A proactive alarm creation and association to track volume trouble tickets
- Tracking reported faults to trouble tickets on periodic basis, thus allowing diagnosis of resolution time for reported customer issues. As an example trending this relationship would map the increasing faults to customer downtime. Similarly if there is fast resolution to issues, then faults could be high but the downtime is low, a good indication.
- The TT systems would be polled to generate reports that tie them back to vendor products and partner service providers. This can only be achieved through a detailed tagged trouble ticketing systems, which facilitates a query mechanism based on these tags. Thus this data can be correlated back to the faults reporting during the same periods.
- Based on effective correlation of TT to network uptime a process should be introduced for improving service availability. Basically this should be dynamic process derived through automated queering of TT systems and fault reporting systems.
