Xangati Turns CSRs Into Broadband Troubleshooters

Eatel has 21 CSRs that support customers in its Louisiana-based serving area. Harris Miller, the man responsible for those CSRs as well as the engineering groups for both switched voice and Internet data, said he was skeptical about Xangati’s claim that with its product, CSRs could take the load off engineers and service technicians by doing what amounts to LAN analysis on the customer premises.

He isn’t so skeptical now.

"We have looked at some of these products before, some deep packet inspection boxes, and you basically needed an IP engineer to drive them and even they needed a lot of training," Miller said. "So I was actually pleasantly surprised when they brought in the product for a demo back in December. We wound up purchasing it at the end of the month."

Miller said Eatel uses Xangati’s product to diagnose problems from the call center versus having a technician go out and isolating the network just to tell the customer that the DSL is fine and that they have a problem inside the home. "Now we can focus in and tell them exactly what we see on the pipe and how they are using their bandwidth," he said.

Miller also was concerned about the complexity of the tool and the potential training required. However, after installing the product and letting it run for a couple of days to build up profile information, the reps were monitoring and troubleshooting problems within hours, he said.

Seventy percent of Eatel’s 18,000 subscribers have fiber to the home; the other 30 percent have copper-based DSL. Nearly 25 percent of calls into the customer care center are being correctly diagnosed by customer service reps, eliminated the requisite truck rolls. "I hope to see that compound over time," Miller said.