Communications Providers and their business customers are now experiencing faster repairs to their private circuits and fewer repeat faults, through a series of engineering and monitoring initiatives

SPEEDIER DIAGNOSIS

Known as the BT Wholesale 'Vantage Programme', the fresh approach involves a multi-pronged attack on the problem, as Malcolm Butler, BT Wholesale's Head of Service - Repair, explains: "Our speed of repair has been a major cause of customer dissatisfaction. So our first step has been to add some new robotic tools to the eCo online system that customers use to report faults. These tools automate fault diagnosis, so something that used to take about an hour to do manually can now take just ten minutes. The tools can also despatch fault reports direct to the field engineers so they can act more quickly."

MORE PEOPLE

Crucially there are also more engineers available. Malcolm continues: "We're setting up helpdesks to provide our engineers with specialist technical support round the clock. Through this, we can now be more flexible. We can also supplement the private circuit experts by supporting them with extra resources from other engineering teams: for example, when extreme weather conditions or floods lead to a sudden surge in faults."

BETTER RESOLUTION

The Vantage Programme also recognises that repeat faults present an extra inconvenience for customers. Here the solution is a new dedicated monitoring team. Malcolm says: "Operating 24/7, they're responsible firstly for tracking repairs in progress and updating customers hourly through online status reports. Secondly, when the engineers complete a repair, they now hand the circuit over to the monitoring team who then watch its performance for at least 24 hours - sometimes up to five days. We aim to cut repeat faults by 50 per cent in this way."

READ BETWEEN THE LINES

RAISING THE BAR

The Vantage Programme's target is to assure customers of a repair to their private circuit within five hours in 90 per cent of cases. Malcolm's team is well on the way to delivering that. It's a key service improvement that Communications Providers can capitalise on to deliver an even higher level of service to their own business customers. Malcolm concludes: "When we launched the new approach in July 2006, we were hitting 80 per cent in five hours. By December 2006 we had advanced to 86 per cent. But we're committed to continuing the improvements even when we reach that 90 per cent target."

KILOSTREAM PRIVATE CIRCUITS

BT Wholesale provides a choice of robust, high-reliability connectivity solutions for voice and data traffic through Kilostream digital private circuits. With extensive availability UK-wide, these offer a range of transmission speeds between 2.4Kbit/s and 64Kbit/s: an ideal option for linking corporate LANs and supporting mission-critical applications such as ordering systems, stock control and access to host computers from regional or branch offices.

 You can find more information here.