Approaches to the development of Customer Care Service Management Systems David Lundberg & Mark Tierney
Broadcom Éireann Research
Kestrel House, Clanwilliam Place
Dublin 2, IRELAND
E-mail: dl {mt}@broadcom.ie

Declan O’Sullivan
IONA Technologies
8-34 Percy Place
Dublin 4, IRELAND
E-mail: decaln@iona.ie

Abstract

The telecoms market place of today and of the future will increasingly be characterised as "fragmented" involving several service providers and network providers of all shapes and sizes (both new and incumbent) co-operating and competing to offer customer services. A consequence of this fragmentation, is the increased need for the various actors whether competing or co-operating in customer service provision to interact extensively and efficiently. This paper will discuss how two initiatives, NM Forum SMART and RACE II DESSERT (R2021) are making significant progress to the frameworks and functionality in this area.

The Main Challenges

Service providers in a competitive telecom market are facing many new requirements that will lead to radical changes in the way they operate and the kind of support systems they use. The real challenge is the fact that everything is happening at the same time. Only in the area of customer care, service providers are influenced from at least three different directions: from the customers, from the internal networks and services and from the fact that the service market is changing shape.

The Customer Challenge

Customers will no longer be satisfied with the level of service and support they have traditionally got from service providers. Radical changes are needed to tackle long lead times and inflexibility in the customer care area.

Customer satisfaction is one of the most common phrases in strategic plans of service providers on a competitive market. It is easy to discuss customer satisfaction in general terms and stress the importance of new solutions in this area, but it is more difficult to describe how it is going to be implemented and how success is going to be measured.

Service provision is a key area in customer care. It represents the first contact with the customer, which means it has to be dealt with professionally, otherwise the customer will choose another provider.

The Internal Infrastructure Challenge

The continuing expansion, performance and flexibility of the telecommunications infrastructure are providing a new and important focus to the forging of telecommunications strategy world-wide. For service providers, the provision of high integrity, flexible services is increasingly seen as a major source of competitive advantage, at both a national and global level. In order to meet this demand, fundamental changes will be necessary in the structure and supply of telecommunication networks, with traditional boundaries between switching and access, junction and trunk transmission topologies likely to disappear in the process.

Technology trends suggest a move from the complex, active, heterogeneous, copper-based networks of today towards simple, passive, homogeneous optical networks of the future. Bandwidth and communication distance will cease to become the most important factors and functionality will become crucial. Provisioning will become more concerned with configuring the network access point and setting up access to appropriate pieces of software and less concerned with network resources or capacity. Indeed, service providers will need an effective internal provisioning process if they are to survive.

The Market Challenge

The multitude of services and service providers will change the shape of the telecom market. It will be more and more difficult for a service provider to provide a complete range of services. Instead services will be bought and sold on an open market. This requires better means to interact between service providers when designing and implementing an offer to a customer. The complexity arising from the other two trends above will by no means make this problem easier.

How to meet the Challenges

The technology and business requirements outlined above have to be addressed by new solutions for service provision. In the rest of this paper two initiatives are helping service providers to meet these challenges by looking at the process, the decision support and the open market requirements.

Focusing on the Service Provision Process

To reach real improvements in the service provision area it is necessary to start by defining how a more efficient end-to-end process should look like. This process should start by looking into the end customers organisation and proceed all the way into the combination of services and components from several service providers on the market. The process model should be developed on such a level that it is applicable to many different market situations and types of service providers. The process model will be used as the common base when describing information, interfaces and support systems, i.e. used as a driver in re-engineering activities.

Focusing on Decision Support

Using computer based support systems service providers will be able to meet customer demands more effectively, more economically and more dynamically. To date, there have been few computer support tools to aid in the service provision process. In fact, a substantial amount of provisioning is traditionally 'pen & paper' based and very time consuming. Sophisticated software needs to be developed that will assist personnel in their decision making process and enable computers to work in partnership with human experts. Powerful Decision Support Systems (DSS) are prime candidates to help personnel cope with increasingly complex engineering problems associated with service provision. Such DSSs are software modules that will help automate the decisions faced in provisioning. The objective is to help the user make non-trivial decisions, understand deciding factors, understand trade-offs and provide computational support where possible.

Focusing on the Open Market for Services

The service provision process has traditionally been an internal business concern of large providers. This means that they have had total control of the process and no external negotiations and interfaces have been necessary. To be able to sell a complete package of services to an end user, service providers need to be able to negotiate and buy services from subcontractors. In this process many different niches and roles will emerge (e.g. agents, wholesalers, total solution providers, etc.) Some service providers will only focus on combining services from other providers, while some will complement their internal offering with some external ones. Subsequently, it is not possible to define exactly the type of relations that exist between service providers. Instead, it is necessary to develop flexible solutions that can be adapted to different situations. Standards and industrial agreements will be needed to achieve this open market for services.

The SMART and DESSERT Initiatives

Two key initiatives in the area of service provision are the NM Forum SMART activity and the RACE II DESSERT (R2021) project. In this section a brief overview of SMART and how its specification work is helping service providers in some of the challenges related to the service provision process and how the process can be open. The work DESSERT has carried out in specification and implementation of the service provision process will also be described.

NM Forum SMART

In October 1994 NM Forum (NMF) launched a new work area called SMART (Service Management Re-engineering and Automation Team). The idea being, to focus on how to automate and re-engineer service management activities across company borders while taking into account the different market situations that are possible.

As a starting point, SMART began its work with a pre study where a common business process model was developed (see figure 1) [1]. Two types of service management processes will be the main focus of the SMART activities:

"Customer Care" processes involving direct interactions between a customer and a service provider. These include sales, order handling, problem handling, performance reporting and billing/collections.
"Service Development and Delivery" processes which serve to satisfy customer needs by causing specific actions to be taken within the network and/or systems components. These include service planning and development, service configuration, service problem resolution, service quality management and rating/discounting.

As a starting point three processes were chosen as a target for automation and standards within the Customer Care Process. These are: Ordering, Problem Handling and Trouble Reporting.

Figure 1: The NM Forum service provider business process model¹.

Each of the processes being addressed will have a specific interface to focus on. The choices are: service provider to service provider or end customer to service provider. The ordering group is focusing on the service provider to service provider interface.

The Focus of the SMART Ordering Group

One of the most crucial parts of ordering telecom services is the interface between different service providers. Therefore, the SMART ordering team is focused on this particular interface. However, it is not possible to narrow the scope too much when collecting the requirements on this interface. The overall goal is to make the entire ordering process more efficient and this interface is only one aspect of this process. Therefore, the study has started with a broad view of the entire ordering process, which has been narrowed down to focus in on the service provider to service provider interface. By doing this, most of the results like process models and information models are useful throughout the whole ordering process and can just as well be used to support internal support systems in service provider organisations.

The DESSERT Project

DESSERT started in 1992 and ended in December 1994 and is a part of the RACE II initiative, which is partly funded by the European Commission. The purpose of the project has been to explore how supportive Decision Support System (DSS) techniques are for service providers. A strength of the DESSERT project has been the successful combination of diverse Advanced Information Processing (AIP) techniques (namely Knowledge-Based Systems and Operations Research) to provide decision support for the provision of services.

Three prototype Decision Support Systems (DSSs) have been developed within DESSERT which aim to address different stages of provisioning:

The Customer Requirements Capture (CRC) DSS [2] helps to establish a technical specification of the customers service requirements. It supports the user in capturing the customer's requirements and converting them from the language used by the customer to a set of technical, network independent specifications for required services.
The Generation and Selection of Alternative Configurations (GSAC) DSS improves the rapid provisioning of accurate technical solutions. This system helps to identify and assign the necessary service and network resources that satisfy both the customer's and service provider's requirements [3].
The Resource Scheduling (RS) DSS [4] which helps schedule and allocate the resources necessary for these services to be initiated (i.e. work crew scheduling).

To support these demonstrations, the project has produced a DSS Toolkit, incorporating the concepts of reuse, and allowing for the easy development of other service management Decision Support Systems (DSSs) from existing building blocks (referred to as 'tools') [5].The project has developed an architecture providing guidelines, models and concepts as a basis for developing service management DSSs more efficiently, in the context of a multi-service, multi-network environment.

The project has also advanced the understanding and modelling of the service provision process primarily through the medium of CFS H414 [6]. Of particular significance has been DESSERT's modelling of how the service provision lifecycle relates to service creation and service usage lifecycles and this has contributed to the ongoing ETSI NA6 work [7].

A New Approach to Service Provision

SMART and DESSERT are approaching service provision from different angles. SMART produces standards and recommendations that will make efficient service provision possible in an open market and DESSERT has produced prototypes and recommendations for how to automate some of the key processes within service provision. Each one represents a powerful solution to their particular area, but combined together they represent an almost total approach to the whole area of service provision

The next section starts from the SMART ordering process and information models and shows how DESSERT results can be used to automate the parts of the process that will be crucial for competitive service provision.

An Ordering Process Model

The overall goal of the SMART Ordering process model is to meet customers’ need for new services as efficient as possible. This means that a whole range of different type of cases from customers wanting a simple quote on a single service to customers going though a complete design and negotiation phase of a complex offering. The ordering process can stop with a proposal to be considered by the customer or go the whole way to firm the orders and implement the offer. This puts some extra demands on the process model which must be reflected in the model with a high degree of flexibility. The SMART Ordering model is still in a draft status and will not be finalised until late 1995. The main parts of the model are depicted in figure 2.

Figure 2: The main processes of the draft SMART ordering process model, showing the interfaces between customers and service providers/network providers (SP/NP). A mapping of the DESSERT work is also shown.

Each of the processes in this model is described in more detail below.

Manage Customer

To be able to adapt the ordering process as much as possible to the customers needs, the ordering process starts in the customers’ organisation. Depending on the type of customer the process varies, but all customers will have some methods to make sales enquires, order services and to query about the progress of an order. To fit these activities as well as possible the first process in the service providers organisation is a manage customer process that handles all the interactions and administration needed to deal with this.

Identify all Services

The next process in the service providers’ organisations is focused on identifying all services that should be a part of the offer to the customer. This process is the heart of the whole ordering process. It is the process where the main differences between service providers can be seen. A service provider that can discuss customer needs in customer related terms, translate it into services, ask for external and internal options and then present it to customers while they are waiting has a definite competitive edge. This process has four sub processes to go through in design an offer for a customer (see figure 3):

Figure 3: The sub-processes of the Identify All Services process.

The approach adopted by DESSERT provides a good mapping to the four processes outlined in figure 3. The Customer Requirements Capture (CRC) Decision Support System (DSS) developed in DESSERT is designed to assist telecommunications sales people in their negotiations with clients. It is designed to be taken by a sales consultant to a customer site for use within the negotiating context shown in figure 4.

Figure 4: The CRC DSS requirements engineering situation.

The system helps in identifying the communication needs of customers in order to provide the best solution satisfying the global communication requirements of an organisation. The need for such a decision support tool stems from the complexity of the service provision process today: an increasing range of services, each of which may be configured for individual customers. This complexity makes it very difficult for individual salespeople to maintain an overview of current service portfolios and to make a correct mapping between the customer's requirements and available services.

Few tools are currently available to support sales staff. Although simple administrative systems exist, these offer little help for the complexity of the service provision process. In this respect, the CRC DSS is an innovative solution to a problem which is currently taxing telecommunications service providers. It illustrates many innovative concepts concerning the use of DSSs in requirements capture during service provision, both from a service provider and customer perspective. The CRC DSS has generated significant interest from the service providers in the DESSERT consortium. The main points of emphasis are:

· More customer information captured and processed at each stage of the processing of a communication need.

· More and better support to the user as well as the customer due to the incorporation of a well structured model of the services in the service providers portfolio and the gathering and presentation of more information useful to both sales person and customer (e.g., cost aspects).

· Improved quality of support by the system arising from more exploitation of AIP techniques (e.g. semantic analysis, matching algorithms and fuzzy set theory) and due to enhanced Human Computer Interaction.

· Improved flexibility given to the user through integration of a blackboard model.

· The CRC prototype has generated significant interest for its potential downstream use in service provision - a comparable level of support is not available to service providers within existing systems.

DESSERT adopted a tool-based approach to the construction of decision support systems so that each DSS is composed of a number of domain specific tools. In the same way that a DSS may be broken down into component tools, a question may be broken down into simpler sub-questions, and each tool may be coupled to a sub-question which helps in answering the overall query.

Six questions have been identified as needing to be answered in order to provide advice to clients on the purchase of telecommunications services:

Who is the customer?
What does the customer do?
What does the customer need?
What are the customer's service requirements?
Which services match these requirements?
How much will it cost the customer?

Answers to these questions are based on the elicitation, representation and analysis of requirements information. Recalling the notion of different languages, the DSS is required to help in translation, and our approach to bridging the gap is to exploit multiple representations of requirements information and allow incremental mappings between these models.

As a result, the approach relies upon conceptual modelling to represent information related to the various questions which need to be answered. Each question is related to a tool which is responsible for gathering a particular type of information and performing a mapping from one representation to another. Figure 5 gives an example of one of the tools used to identify the service requirements.

Figure 5: An example of how the Identifying Requirements screen looks in the DESSERT prototype.

The CRC DSS shows the type of functionality that is required at this stage in identify all services. Service providers require new approaches to customer support. An understandable dialogue has to take place between the customer and service provider which will lead to a common understanding of both requirements and solutions.

Place Sub-order

When the offer to the customer has been agreed in the "Identify All Services" process a firm sub order can be sent to external providers and internally to realise the solution. This process also deals with the planning of how to carry out the implementation as efficient as possible.

Track Order

When waiting for the offer to be implemented the main service provider must be able to track the progress of the implementation. This can be done on a continuous bases where the sub contracted service providers send information on what is happening or be triggered by the main service provider when the customer asks about the progress.

Check Feasibility of Individual Services

In the subcontracted service provider organisations there will be almost the same type of processes as in the main service provider. The only differences are that in this case the customer is another service provider and that they require a special process to check feasibility of services when they get a question about a service, rather than a firm order.

Configure Services

During the implementation of an offer the key process is to configure services. In this process the necessary adaptations are made to produce what is needed to fulfil the order. This process is also addressed by the DESSERT project with the goal to automate it.

The Generation & Selection of Alternative Configurations (GSAC) Decision Support System (DSS) developed in DESSERT is designed to support telecommunication engineers to assign service and network resources from diverse network technologies offering different capabilities or characteristics. The system helps to identify and assign the necessary network and service resources that satisfy both the customer's and provider's requirements. The need for decision support arises from the complexity of the resource assignment process: diverse network and service technologies, company policy and practice, various manufacturer equipment, commercial preferences, the required customer service, etc.

To date there have been few decision support tools to aid in this process. In fact, a substantial amount of service provision has traditionally been a 'pen & paper' exercise, and has consumed much time and personnel resources. The computer solutions that do exist are generally constructed based on a singular type of technique and are also dedicated to support the assignment of one kind of network resource (e.g. ISDN) only. The effort involved in assigning these resources will be significant, considering the scale and diversity of networks, and the multiplicity of services that are expected in the predicted growth of telecommunication services.

The GSAC DSS is an innovative solution to a complex problem, improving the rapid provisioning of accurate technical solutions. The availability of decision support will help telecommunications personnel and increase their effectiveness and flexibility in being enabled to work with diverse resources of many different network technologies. The GSAC approach successfully supports a much more efficient use of resources by the service provider as it enables those provisioning tasks related to resource assignment to be undertaken taking account of a multiple network and service environment. The main points of emphasis are:

· An integrated and consistent support system, addressing a wide breadth of resource assignment tasks at transit, access and service levels (for example MAN, X.25, ISDN and IN)

· A combination of Operations Research (OR) and Knowledge-Based System (KBS) techniques.

· Good graphical interfaces to support the user in generating the resource assignment solution by providing multiple views onto the problem.

· Unique computer aided support for a task traditionally time consuming and pen & paper based.

· No existing systems on the market tackle the problem of resource assignment in the integrated and consistent way that GSAC does.

· An improved flexible and evolvable architecture, for integrating a diverse range of tools and techniques, using a blackboard model.

Service providers must be able to propose solutions quickly. The GSAC DSS shows the type of functionality that is required at this stage configure services and the solutions offered need to be accurate, meeting both the customer’s and provider’s requirements.

The Interfaces in Focus

As the general ordering process (figure 2) shows, at least three different interfaces between service providers need to be defined to cope with all the aspects of ordering. These interfaces are addressed in SMART:

The negotiation phase where different alternative services are compared to produce the best offer to the customer.
The firm order phase where the order is being placed at subcontracted services providers to be implemented.
The order tracking phase where the main service provider keeps track of the progress of the order implementation to be able to guarantee delivery on-time and to be able to answer customer queries about the progress.

DESSERT was not concerned with the interfaces that the Decision Support Systems could have in an open environment, but the blackboard approach could very well be extended to bring this on board.

Summary and The Way Forward

The SMART and DESSERT approaches to the service provision represent an excellent complement (see the table below) to each other that will make it possible to take a big step forward to a more customer oriented and a more efficient service provision process. They share the same basic view of how the underlying service provision process looks, which means that it is easy to use DESSERT technologies to support the SMART process.

	Service Provision Process & Functionality	Decision Support	Open Markets
SMART	specifications	no	specification of interfaces
DESSERT	some specification (H414) & ideas on functionality	yes functionality specification & implementation	none

SMART contributes with the overall common business process model which will make it possible to get a common understanding between service providers and suppliers of support systems. It also provides the information model that is needed to speak a common language and to open the market for a whole range of service providers involved in providing end user services.

The results from DESSERT fit very well into the key processes of the SMART model that need to be automated to achieve real improvement of lead times and costs. It is clear that the deployment of computer based service management systems will provide substantial support in the process of service provision. Decision support techniques have been successfully applied to address the requirement capture process and the configuration of services. These two processes have so far been manual and have required highly skilled personnel.

From a service provider perspective it is necessary to develop a total solution for service provision that will make it possible to automate and enhance the whole end-to-end process. A very efficient interface between two service providers will lead to information transfer between these two actors in seconds, but if the translation of requirements to services takes a day, no real improvements are made. Therefore, the real benefits of the SMART and DESSERT work lies in the combination of these two into a future support system for service provision.

The automation achieved by using the DESSERT approach also opens up the possibility to let the end customer control parts of the service provision process himself. On-line service provision will be a natural next step to speed up the process even further and to provide better support to customers with special demands for flexibility and short lead times.

References

[1] Network Management Forum; ‘A Service Management Business Process Model’, NMF 1995.

[2] Tattersall, C., et al.; ‘But why should I buy your service?: Decision Support for Telecommunications Sales Consultants’, Proceedings of the Third International Society for Decision Support Systems Conference, Hong Kong, June 1995.

[3] Tierney, M., Davison, R.; ‘Decision Support for the Provision of Services: Integrating Knowledge-Based and Optimisation Models for Resource Assignment’, Communicate, The Technical Journal of Broadcom, Volume 2 Issue 1 June 1995.

[4] Porté, N., Valette, C.; ‘A Decision Support System for Scheduling and Network Configuration Installation’, DESSERT RACE II (R2021) Deliverable 25 Final Recommendations, 1994.

[5] O'Sullivan S., et. al.; ‘A Reuse Methodology for Service Management’, 7th International Conference of Systems Research, Informatics and Cybernetics, Baden, Germany, 1994.

[6] RACE Common Functional Specification H414 ‘Service Provisioning’ Issue E

[7] Davison R., O'Brien P.; ‘Service Provisioning in a Multi-Provider Environment’, In Proceedings of the 1994 Intelligence in Services and Networks Conference (IS&N'94), Springer Verlag, 1994.

1 Figure from NM Forum document “A Service Management Business Process Model”