Guidance on the best ways deal with a telecom outage – Your essential temforce Guide
Blog one in a series of three – What is the impact on an outage?
When you are paying for a service, you expect it to be available to you any time you need it. You pay your water bill, so clean water comes out of your taps; you pay for electricity, so your lights go on when you flick a switch; and you pay local taxes, so that your garbage is collected and your street is kept clean.
If there is an interruption in this service – this service that you are paying for – you have every right to be angry.
You will want to know what caused the disruption, when normal service will be resumed, and whether or not it is likely to be disrupted again in the near future. If these issues continue, you may even ask for your money back or start looking for a new supplier.
Telco companies offer an increasingly important service across a series of different platforms. In business, (and at home) we expect instant and continuous connectivity anytime and anywhere. At best, a temporary outage is an inconvenience. At worst, it can cost money. Either way, you are going to need to deal with an outage as well as deal with more than a few angry customers, so you better know how to get things back up and running as quickly as possible. Or better yet – prevent the outage from ever happening in the first place.
In this three-part series of blogs, we will explain the real cost of outages, how they can be prevented, and how to manage them quickly and effectively.
What is the impact of an outage?
In large companies with a complex telecoms network, there are two different types of outage: a partial outage and a complete outage.
A complete outage is, ironically, a little easier to handle. It may be the result of a power failure, or a physical fault in the system. But a partial outage can be harder to identify, and to fix.
No matter how big the outage, there will be a personal impact – without a fully functioning network, you will be unable to do your work properly and on time, and this will have a knock-on effect across your department or branch office. This in turn will impact across the whole company, and the cost will add up. Internally, people will be unable to meet their performance targets and they will have less time to close deals or service accounts of their own. If the network is down for a while, it can have a very real impact in terms of financials and company performance.
If you are a Telco or similarly service-based organisation, the customers will hold you responsible for even the smallest outage, and the finger-pointing will begin.
No one wants to deal with customer complaints, and no one wants to look like an idiot in front of the boss, but until the outage has ended and a root cause has been identified, this is exactly what will happen – and you better hope you won’t be in the firing line.
After the outage has been resolved, there will be an investigation and an attempt to prevent a similar disruption from happening again, but this may be too little, too late.
From an internal perspective, time lost is money lost. From an external, customer-facing perspective, you are risking your company’s reputation.
If your electricity was continuously being cut off, you wouldn’t hang around in the dark waiting for a measured explanation and a detailed report – you’d change suppliers.
Service levels have never been higher, and both internal and external customers have certain expectations of their suppliers. If you fail to deliver, the fallout could be disastrous.
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