In the ‘Troubleshooting the WLAN’ webcast that I did earlier this week, I talked about the technical items that the helpdesk really needs to know to move from a ‘Production Metric’ helpdesk to a ‘Customer Service’ helpdesk. The helpdesk industry over the last decade has really moved from being an organization that is geared around hold times, abandonment rates, tickets opened, calls received, and other production metrics to an organization that starts to value the ‘softer’ side of the call center.

These ‘softer’ customer service metrics are geared around first call resolution, reopened ticket percentage, and other items that revolve around how the caller feels about the experience, rather than just how fast the helpdesk can pick up the phone. If we look out at the IT industry as a whole, there have been several recent examples of large IT companies who forgot that customer satisfaction is just as important as how fast you answer the phone! Now, those companies are paying for it with reduced sales, a falling stock price, and erosion of their corporate brand value.

So, to take this down from an overall corporate view and apply it to the wireless helpdesk, what do we need to give to our front line employees to improve their customer service metrics? Well, it boils down to giving them the applications to solve problems immediately, and if they can’t be solved at their level, the ability to escalate to the proper team for a quick resolution.

In the wireless space, it’s all about letting the helpdesk view real time user information, visually displaying RF information in an easy to read format (remember, the helpdesk is not staffed with RF engineers), trending information (see my earlier blog on ‘Troubleshooting Deltas’), and other troubleshooting dashboards. This way, the helpdesk can accurately diagnose the problem and either fix the issue, or get the trouble ticket to the correct place in the least amount of time.

Once the helpdesk is able to start focusing on the ‘softer’ side of their business, the user satisfaction rates will go up and the ROI of the wireless network starts to really take hold.

 

 AirWaves Podcast with Manatee Schools [20:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this latest installment of AirWaves, I spoke with Ron Jones who is one of the Network Systems Managers for Manatee County School District, one of the largest in the country with over 49,000 students and 7,000 employees.

Like most school districts, the wireless network at Manatee has grown over time. Manatee CSD now has about 2,000 wireless access points from Cisco and ProCurve by HP and serves up wireless access to just about every campus in the district.

As you can imagine, Ron has his hands full and has found ways to use his AirWave Management Platform to streamline many of the manual processes.

Managed Service Providers (or MSP’s) have been participating in a pretty high growth business environment over the last few years. These organizations range from the major Telcos (Verizon and AT&T) to major hardware vendors (IBM and HP) to major System Integrators (CSC and Accenture) to regional niche players. It seems that just about anyone who is involved in IT wants to join the lucrative business of outsourcing or co-sourcing their customers networks and environments.

As WLANs become more prevalent and mission critical, this new area of networking is drawing the attention of many of these players. A year and a half ago, Verizon Business was one of the first to jump in a public way into this arena. It makes sense with Verizon’s history of wireless, networking, and now outsourcing, that they would be a leader in WLAN management. But Verizon Business is not alone in this field. Just about every MSP that offers network management is preparing to also offer WLAN management.

As these organizations enter into the WLAN management arena there are a few pitfalls they need to be aware of:

1. WLANs need to be managed differently the LANs. Due to the inherent nature of wireless, these devices need to be monitored in very different ways than their router and switch brethren. MSPs who make the mistake of just offering simple “up/down” status will not be doing their customer any favors - it is critical to provide RF management and optimization to ensure that not only are devices up, but that the network is actually working.
2. WLAN management needs to be integrated with LAN management. I think MSPs grasp this one pretty quickly - from a purely cost perspective. If the MSP has to build out a parallel infrastructure just for WLAN management then it will take them a long time to make a profit. By integrating WLAN specific tools into their existing operational infrastructure they can gain leverage and re-use many of the skill sets and processes that they have in house.
3. WLAN is just the beginning. Any MSP who starts discussing with their customer about managing their WLAN needs to understand that its not just the APs and/or controllers that need to be managed…it’s all the rest of the network as well. This includes the authentication infrastructure, the wired network that the wireless devices connect to, power, firewalls, etc. This is a great opportunity for the MSP to showcase all of their wares but they have to have this mindset from the beginning.

MSPs have a great opportunity in the WLAN space and can provide a fantastic service to their clients. As this market matures this level of service is going to become more and more important.