Whether you are a large service provider with many paying customers, or a large enterprise with multiple internal divisions, the satisfaction of end users is a paramount objective. If a service provider's customers are unhappy with the service levels they receive, or find it difficult to change their services easily, then it doesn’t matter how good the collaboration services are; you will receive complaints and you will ultimately lose customers. For enterprises, this will effect employee productivity.
In this day and age, it is no longer acceptable to have a manual process for key customer processes such as ordering, change management, or reporting. Users can order an airline ticket, book a rental car, our purchase a book instantly. They expect nothing less from their communications service provider.
In fact, the ability to deliver services more efficiently can be a competitive advantage to providers. It can win you new customer and it can encourage internal customers to join a central platform, rather than decide to build their own platform, or even outsource to a third party.
The following are some of the areas of VOSS Solutions management where organizations can deliver superior customer service:
Single business portal for all collaboration services (a single “pane of glass”)
Managing multiple collaboration services, where each application operates from a separate server, with its own separate GUI, has always been a pain for administrators. Performing day-to-day administration, where basic tasks, such as adding a user and their services, has meant logging onto multiple systems, often with different usernames and passwords for each system. This is error prone and time consuming.
VOSS provides a “single pane of glass” for the management of multiple collaboration services. You need log into only the one VOSS business portal and, from that single instance, you can manage a range of business processes, such as adding a user, and VOSS will perform all of the separate provisioning automatically.
Faster service delivery for new applications
Adding a new collaboration service is non-trivial when performed manually. Installing the application server is not difficult, but providing that service to all existing users can be an arduous task, especially when there are multiple levels or classes of service to provision depending on the type of staff member.
VOSS is a fulfillment management platform that is specifically designed for collaboration services. This means that a new service can be bundled in with an existing user profile and all existing users with that profile will now be entitled for that service.
This greatly speeds the delivery and reduces the effort of introducing a new service.
Real-time self-care for end users
End users have been able to self-manage their telephony services since the introduction of IP telephony; mostly through the phone soft-keys, but in some cases through an online self-care portal. This included the ability to change call forward settings or speed dials. However, with the advent of collaboration services, no one has been able to aggregate a multi-service collaboration self-care portal, which supports all of the new mobility and messaging functions.
VOSS provides a multi-service self-care portal, along with xml applications for the phone TUI, to allow all of the latest collaboration settings to be self-managed by end users. Being able to change your single number reach settings, modify your messaging notification settings, or change the line label text on your phone, are all now possible in real-time, from a single, self-care portal.
Enable customers to maintain strategic control of their communications
When moving to a central communications platform, a complaint from the IT departments of the various internal customers is that they lose strategic control of critical communications tools. They also complain that the turn-around time for changes from the central help desk is too slow and error prone.
VOSS delivers a management capability that enables the centralization of the infrastructure, while maintaining strategic control of the internal customers. Their services levels actually improve because their changes are performed in real time.
Real-time service profile management and reporting
The traditional model of service profile delivery has been quite cumbersome for most organizations. The central HR team will decide on what service levels are offered and users are slotted into a particular profile, whether it suits their needs or not.
VOSS allows for much greater granularity of service profile management, against agreed business rules, where individual users can be provided additional services by local office administrators, on an as-needed basis. That is, rather than having to ask for a profile modification, which can take days, the local administrator can perform the task in real-time. This empowers the local administrators and reduces the workload on the central help desk.
In addition, VOSS provides real-time reporting of service level changes that can be automatically fed to mediation systems for internal accounting purposes. In other words, a change to a user will automatically be reflected in the internal accounting for that department.
