While summertime generally brings warmer weather, backyard barbecues, and beach vacations, it’s also the onslaught of a season of inclement weather. Severe thunderstorms and devastating hurricanes can leave behind a trail of destruction across a company’s network map. The threat of these events leaves a dark cloud of impending outages over communication service providers’ heads.
Storm outages, like any network incidents, can bring both business and residential customers’ connection to a grinding halt. In a time where many individuals are working from their homes due to COVID-19 concerns, the need to stay online and productive is now greater than ever. Without the proper tools in place, providers can lose valuable time trying to identify the source of the outage, which customers the outage affects, and coordinating resources to repair and restore service. Data is lost in translation across the central office, CSRs, engineers, and the NOC. This leaves teams scrambling to get all the necessary information, delaying the return of service and disgruntling customers in the process.
With over 40 storm seasons in the industry, Mapcom has worked alongside our clients to create a streamlined workflow between dispatchers, technicians, and equipment management systems. Here’s how our process allows your company to work as one team to respond to an outage with minimal interruption to customers’ service and your workday.
The ability to locate and assess the severity of the outage as soon as possible is crucial to decreasing MTTR. With integrations to your network’s EMS alarms, M4 Solutions can help you identify the affected equipment and map the outage area. From there it’s easy to determine which customers are affected by leveraging M4’s physical connectivity model to trace the impacted outside plant to customer locations. CSRs can use this report’s contact information to proactively notify subscribers of the service interruption before they start calling in complaints.
Meanwhile, incident response teams can create, view, and manage outage tickets with Workforce. This allows dispatchers to react quickly with on-the-fly scheduling, assigning the closest technicians with the required skillset to respond. Providers responsible for SLAs can also use circuit assignments to prioritize the corresponding tickets to avoid costly penalties.
As techs arrive on the scene and begin to repair the damages, Mobile Tech creates a channel of real time communication between the field and office. Techs can provide updates on ticket status and record notes from their mobile device or laptop to keep everyone informed. Once a ticket is closed, CSRs can clear the ticket and communicate back to the customer.
Once the damage is repaired and connectivity is restored, providers can also use M4 to help report the outage and analyze trends across connection types or time of year.
Outages are inevitable, but they don’t have to be detrimental to your success or customer satisfaction. Mapcom is ready to help you weather the storms of network outages with a workflow designed to get your networks back up and running at lightning speed.
What’s Next?
- Watch our on-demand webinar about building a proactive NOC that integrates EMS with GIS network maps
- See Mapcom’s outage workflow in action by requesting a demo from one of our Solutions Engineers