When Telcos show inefficiencies that are not promptly intercepted before affecting the quality of the customer experience, they risk losing important market shares.
Customers expect excellent service standards 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For this reason, an efficient IT monitoring activity is now an essential requirement to get real-time information on the entire network, check provision of services, identify any errors or problems in the affected system area and resolve them promptly. Therefore, for telcos, the inefficiencies that can be resolved in advance through special monitoring refer to all areas ranging from network and routing topology to server hardware up to processes and backups. In particular, 3 main disservices can be mentioned that can be solved with monitoring:
- lack of end-to-end visibility across the entire telco technology stack;
- very high Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR);
- late detection of fraudulent activities conducted on the network
1) End-to-end visibility for telcos that reduces outages
Modern telcos are characterized by complex architectures which include various components such as networks, web servers, CDR (Call Detail Records), platforms for the provision of services, custom applications and server applications, GPS systems, social media and databases. The lack of end-to-end visibility in this type of scenario prevents you from understanding what is happening when, for example, there is an outage in coverage that can be caused by network congestion, equipment failure, damage to meteorological nature or other reasons. In contemporary monitoring models supporting telcos, inefficiencies are not only recorded a posteriori but identified immediately, if not even before they occur, by a capacity for in-depth analysis of all data sources that are part of IT systems and infrastructure. Monitoring can conduct the so-called "root cause analysis" also through the various IT silos present in the corporate architecture.
2) Why the MTTR parameter limits the disservices of Telcos
One of the best-known metrics in the context of call centers is that of first call resolution (FCR). As can be deduced from the expression itself, it allows you to calculate how many phone calls made by customers can find a decisive answer from the first time. The levels of customer engagement strongly depend on this parameter. Outside the specific context of call centers, such an indicator closely resembles that of the mean time to resolution (MTTR). The monitoring systems make it possible to track transactions across all the technological layers of the Telco, thus reducing the inefficiencies due to network unavailability thanks to a significant reduction in the MTTR parameter. The peculiarity of the monitoring platforms is that of providing dashboards with ad hoc metrics and reporting that helps to keep under control the performance of the various application and infrastructural elements with which Telcos deliver their data and voice services.
3) Monitoring as a tool to fight online fraud
The third category of inefficiencies Telcos can avoid with monitoring derives from network fraud. The problem of network fraud translates into lost profits and an erosion of the reliability of the telco in the eyes of its customers. The most advanced monitoring strategies can discover fraudulent activities as they occur, correlating data from various sources also with the aid of machine learning algorithms. For this purpose, information from firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS) and web servers are indexed. Security threats can arrive from any part of the IT infrastructure of the Telco, giving rise to even prolonged disruptions which, if not limited in time, can rapidly spread to a large portion of customers. Monitoring has the benefit of collecting a large amount of data, including those that generate incidents, to create models that help security teams prepare a proactive approach in the face of potential attacks and fraud.