Agama – How Telenor Sweden achieves success through resource efficiency and cost reduction with the Agama Frontline Application
Background
Connectivity has been Telenor’s domain for more than 160 years, with the purpose to connect its customers to what matters most. In Sweden, Telenor is one of the largest providers of mobile, broadband and TV. The TV offering covers both delivery of IPTV as well as OTT services.
During the last 10 years, Agama has been proud to be a provider of video observability solutions to Telenor Sweden, becoming an important part of the operational platform. The deployment covers both network points with the Agama Analyzer and Analyzer OTT, as well customer experience observability for STBs and a multitude of apps and platforms such as Connected TVs using the Agama CDM solution.
The Agama CDM solution is a platform for observability down to the individual devices, providing visualization, analytics, alarming and correlation, creating detailed insights about customer experience and device health.
With a lightweight client integrated in the device or app, the solution continuously ingests events, metrics and metadata from all devices in use in real-time.
Challenge: Solve customer issues faster with real-time insights
Telenor identified that issues from customers were escalated into 2nd line from 1st line when they could have been resolved in the first call. If issues could be resolved quicker, it would Improve customer satisfaction while also freeing up time in the operations organization, reducing costs.
“At Telenor, we always strive to ensure that the services always work so the customers never have to call us for that reason. But if customers have to call our customer care agents, we aim to resolve any customer request during the first call,” said Marielle Lind, Technical Architect at Telenor Sweden.
A key requirement for such a solution is that it is quick to understand by the users, and provides the insights needed to solve the customer issues. Also, getting such a solution in place without a complex integration project would reduce costs and lead times.
Solution: Agama Frontline empowers 1st line support care agents to resolve customer issues faster
As a part of its offering portfolio, Frontline is a 1st line focused application offered by Agama to help support care agents to quickly understand customer experience for all kinds of video services: OTT, IPTV or cable. A unique aspect of the Frontline application is that it can correlate service playout, network health and the individual subscriber experience.
The application can be quickly adapted to the specific needs of the operator due to the flexibility of its design. As the Frontline app is deployed within an Agama CDM solution, its web UI can be made directly available to the new users without long integration projects to proprietary customer care systems.
All this made the Agama Frontline app perfectly suited to solve the needs of Telenor SE.
After a joint workshop, Telenor and Agama agreed to work together to adapt Agama Frontline for Telenor’s 1st line use case, in order to empower support agents to identify and resolve issues and reduce escalations.
Implementation and production deployment
The joint project was started with requirement gathering and a first version was made available to Telenor SE. Several iterations were done in an agile manner to ensure that the right information and insights were shown to support the specific needs of Telenor’s delivery architecture.
“We were very excited to work on this project with Agama. The Agama team has clearly understood our needs for improving our customer care processes. The solution team focused its efforts to ensure that Telenor could configure and operate the system completely autonomously, after its deployment in Telenor production environment,” explained Marielle.
“It has been a pleasure to work with Telenor on this project. The feedback loop has been fast, and we have quickly been able to test different paths to a solution that fits to the setup at Telenor, modelling everything from the playout to the customer,” said Lena Rosén, Product Manager & Solution Architect at Agama.
Telenor then deployed Frontline in production for the 1st line staff, where it proved itself to quickly and accurately detect issues in the video delivery chain that were actionable for the support agents.
Result: Eliminating unnecessary escalation and accurately identifies the source of customer issues
By using Agama’s Customer Care application, the support agents can now correlate live TV data with higher-level network monitoring, such as playout analysis, to determine whether the issue originated with the playout or elsewhere.
Additionally, it supports device comparison, matching the customer’s device with other devices that were in use at the same time. For instance, if a customer using an Apple TV encounters issues with one live channel, the system can provide insights into how other Apple TVs were performing while streaming simultaneously.
“Telenor’s customer care teams are very excited about the Frontline solution and the feedback we are receiving clearly confirms that the solution covers the needs we have to help the customer in a good way already during the first call,” said Marielle.
In conclusion, with the new Frontline app Telenor achieves improved customer satisfaction and more efficient handling of support issues, which show their commitment to excellent customer experiences and solidifies their position as an industry leader.
