Xangati Turns CSRs Into Broadband Troubleshooters

A new player in the network and performance management space, Cupertino, Calif.-based Xangati, unveiled its Virtual Task Manager this week and is already showing signs that it could change the way front line customer support is conducted.

The new product employs what Xangati calls rapid problem identification (RPI) to give front-line support teams in Tier 2 and Tier 3 service provider organizations, as well as enterprises, visibility into the networking activities inside the home or small business. And it does so without the use of probes or on-premise devices.

The Xangati Virtual Task Manager provides live views of all end-user interactions and performs symptom analysis, the results from which it displays to the CSR in surprisingly useful ways.

"There is a completely broken process between front line support and the people that sit behind them," said David Messina, vice president of marketing at Xangati. "The process starts with an end user complaint, but the end user report may be completely wrong, but CSRs are [often] flying blind and can’t qualify an issue when the customer calls in."

So the Xangati RPI created a seamless handoff between front-line support and the network operations group that enables it to more rapidly identify the end users' application, network performance, and availability issues.

"[Customer service reps] are the emissary for the service provider and customer service is the determinant for whether a customer stays with the service provider or not," Messina said. "So for the first time, we provide live visibility for the CSR into the activity of each and every subscriber in the service provider infrastructure."

Key features of the Xangati solution include: a live activity view of each end user's networked application interactions; active symptom replay and activity history; dynamic click-thru drilldowns into related applications, servers or peers; proactive alerting and support. It can maintain profiles and history for 100,000 end users per appliance.

According to the Yankee Group, broadband service providers can experience first-year installation and support costs of up to $700 per subscriber for advanced services like IPTV. And Forrester estimates that it takes six calls to the help desk before the source of a problem is identified once service is established.

Xangati already has several deployments with service providers attempting to address this known problem, including deployments at Primelink and Eatel.