PDF of this tutorialA customer-aware system leads to faster, more efficient, and more personalized customer service. With proactive customer relations, a service provider can call a customer to alert them of a service outage before the customer is even aware of the problem. Customer-aware service providers have a real-time view into network events and how those events affect any given customer. Furthermore, the level of alert tied to various events can vary in accordance with the customer’s SLA. For example, if the system receives a data-loss alarm, the customer-centric system will link that alarm with customer information. If the customer has premium-grade service, the event will be flagged as a critical alert. If a customer with standard service is affected by the same event, the system will report a major alert. This gives the service provider the ability to fix problems for the most important customer first or to address an event affecting the most customers.
Customer-aware management also leads to marketing and sales benefits. Service providers can easily determine when a customer hits a predefined performance threshold. The provider’s customer-relations group or sales staff can then contact the customer and suggest a service upgrade.
Customer relations also can benefit tremendously from detailed, customer-specific service-instance histories. It becomes a very simple matter for the customer-aware system to log every event affecting a particular customer, even one with multiple services. The result is a detailed—and very valuable—record of the customer’s experience.
On a broader scale, greater knowledge of how network resources are assigned helps service providers plan resource allocation and conduct capacity planning.
