How redesigning dispatch services helps service providers protect employees, customers and costs

As part of today’s ‘new normal,’ there is a mandate for near zero face-to-face engagements with customers, profoundly compromising the operator’s ability to dispatch a technician to resolve issues customers may be having with connectivity, equipment, devices and so on. Yet providing such support cannot be completely avoided. Even with economies in various states of lockdown, new services continue to be launched – often requiring support at the customer’s home.

In the past, the focus on reducing truck rolls was driven by the need to reduce costs. But with the proliferation of Covid-19, the need to reduce technician dispatches has taken on an additional and new sense of urgency: protecting employees and customers against the dangers of infection.

The 5 pillars of dispatch reduction

The key to achieving the goal of dispatch reduction lies in redesigning business processes on five main fronts:

• Increasing frequency of software and system upgrades, leading to fewer issues and the need to resolve them
• Enabling and expediting front-step delivery of equipment that can override existing hardware or network issues
• Enable the contact center with knowledge and tools to handle support issues typically handled by technicians
• Enhancing self-support options that empower customers to resolve more basic issues on their own
• Synchronizing the OSS and BSS to quickly react to change, i.e. stop dispatch after a customer cancels an installation or repair

And, by synchronizing the OSS and BSS to dispatch systems, service providers can ensure that when a truck roll is required, the dispatch can be effectively monitored and documented for optimized operational efficiency, as well as aligned with the customer for an enhanced customer experience.

How Amdocs can help make this happen

The Amdocs Business Process Services team helps service providers achieve the above five pillars through business process redesign. This includes the following:

Analysis

The Amdocs team analyzes the dispatch load and identifies which can be avoided and handled through the contact center or self-service channels. Moreover, planned dispatches are analyzed to determine if dispatch support is really needed, and if they are, if they can be handled by other personnel.

Dispatch reduction task force

Next, the team assembles a dispatch reduction task force to aggregate source data, analyze the dispatch load to identify additional opportunities for reduction, create tasks for operations, and develop process improvements.

Automation & AI

The team also introduces enhanced data management, real-time automation of tasks, and trends identification as powered by Amdocs iPaaS, our industry-specific integration platform.

Dispatch operations center

In addition, a new dispatch reduction operations center is established, which evaluates dispatch requests, engages with customers, troubleshoots issues and cancels dispatches for tickets that were resolved without requiring a dispatch.

Delivering substantial savings every month

In the absence of a comprehensive solution, service providers can manually scan hundreds of tickets every day, and only following analysis, manage to cancel a dozen or so.

But with business process redesign by Amdocs, which is powered by our Amdocs iPaaS-driven data aggregation enrichment and automation capabilities, it is possible to automatically scan thousands of dispatch requests daily, match the requests to case, outage, network testing and dispatch data, and then generate cancelation recommendations where possible. When cancellations are recommended, subscribers are contacted for confirmation to ensure transparency.

And the savings? Through this approach service providers can achieve 30% reduction in total dispatches.

To learn more about how Amdocs Business Process Services can help you reduce truck rolls and better protect employees, customers and costs, we invite you to reach out to us.