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August 2000 Issue
Feature: Customer Information Centers Keep Internet Services Aloft
Clued-in Clients Don’t Need to Call
By

If you’re offering Internet services, more than likely you’ve wrestled with what kind of network performance updates to provide, how much information to give out, and how? MediaOne’s Bruce Bahlmann offers some solutions.

Why do airlines provide passengers with information on how to prepare for a water landing? As far as I know, no one has ever survived a water landing.

As a frequent flyer, however, I usually do appreciate the abundance of information (good and bad) available from the airlines. Their willingness to keep me updated on performance criteria—on-time arrival, customer complaints—as well as all the in-flight information eliminates my need to seek out that information from their employees such as customer service agents or flight attendants. Perhaps more importantly, by having this knowledge I’m less likely to draw my own conclusions in the event something is wrong and more likely to deal with inconveniences as they occur.

Unlike airlines, businesses providing Internet service are less willing to volunteer such information to their customers. Perhaps Internet service has not yet grown up and out of its trial stages. With Internet service, you rarely get any guarantees. Furthermore, the principle detection of outages results from customers calling to complain about their service. Imagine airlines being dependent on passenger complaints for successful flights—"Pardon me Captain, you might want to check the wing—something’s leaking."

Fortunately, the state of today’s Internet service is not life-threatening, but it can certainly be business-threatening. It is crucial to keep customers informed while seeking all means necessary to maintain consistent, high-quality service. Other industries understand the benefits of keeping clients in the know, and the capability to do so has been around for years. Let’s explore how to give customers Internet service status and performance criteria via a customer information center.

In 1997, MediaOne undertook an effort to provide customers with status information. This effort was met with great resistance from its operations group, which claimed that giving such information to customers would result in spiraling demands for more detailed information—not to mention possible requests for credits. However, these efforts continued and eventually prevailed. The initial response from customers was extremely positive, but the means of providing this service did not get deployed enterprise-wide. Today, this information is only provided in select areas where there is sufficient staff to maintain its content or where local staff has automated the means of keeping information updated.

Over the years, MediaOne’s experience in this area shows that customers are most interested in operational status, acknowledgement of outages, updates regarding fixes, and the timing of planned outages. With this knowledge in hand, customers tend to deal better with the inconveniences "seemingly inherent" to the business of providing Internet service.

Operational status

The operational status component of the customer information center provides current status of various applications that collectively make up a fully functional Internet service (Figure 1). These applications include Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name System (DNS), EMAIL, NEWS, and PROXY. DHCP serves out Internet protocol (IP) addresses to customer cable modems and computers that enable them to access the Internet. DNS is the next critical application that allows computers to resolve a name like www.birds-eye.net to its associated IP address. The remaining applications round out what typical Internet providers supply as part of the Internet services. A hyperlink could provide customers with a link to more specific information about each application as it relates to their Internet experience. This information is typically generated automatically.

Providing updates on outages and fixes

When a customer reports or we detect a problem with an application, we update this information in the following scrolling field (Figure 2). Customers seeking information on an application can first look at its current status, then check for any updates on its recovery. For example, they can be assured that a problem they may be having with NEWS is due to a problem with the application and that it should be back up in 45 minutes. We typically enter this information manually as it tracks with updates being received by one’s network operations center (NOC). This tells customers exactly what they want to know—what is wrong and when can they expect it to be back on-line.

Timing of planned outages

Periodically, you’ll need to perform maintenance on various components of the system that supplies Internet service. This maintenance is usually performed during a service/maintenance window. A service window is a negotiated period of time that has been earmarked for a particular service-related event. Such events are scheduled well in advance (two to three weeks minimum) to allow customers to be notified. (Figure 3) We also update this information manually. Because service windows are infrequent, this is a manageable task.

If one were to consolidate all this information, the result might look like Figure 4. The customer information center could be as basic as a single Web page about the health of your Internet service. A brief glance would tell customers what (if anything) was wrong with the service and whether the problem was right in front of them (perhaps a problem with their computer) or was something out of their control (such as a server or application failure).

A more elaborate version might allow customers to be on an alert e-mail listing of known outages or up-coming service windows. This would allow the capability to send service window updates only to customers who actually request them. Other enhanced services could incorporate more current information—such as up-to-the-minute status updates that could help your technicians in the field as well as your customers.

Commit the resources

There are many ways to provide customers with information on the health of your Internet system. By displaying this on a Web site, you give customers an alternative to calling in and a means to inform them when the system is back online. I’m unaware of any commercial software that does this, so this function would have to be developed within. However, depending on how elaborate you want to get, you can task in-house resources to generate a respectable-looking attempt until you are ready to expand the Web page. Giving customers access to such information will help you improve customer satisfaction and reduce service calls.

Bruce Bahlmann is senior systems engineer for MediaOne’s Internet Services Group.

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