Nitel’s Chicago-based 24/7 network operations center (NOC) includes three levels of technicians, each with increasing amounts of expertise and experience. This ensures that the most qualified technician is handling each and every call. With 15 technicians working at any given time, our team manages about 1,950 inbound calls a month, ranging from routine maintenance to outages or even restoring service after natural disasters. As you can imagine, every situation brings a unique set of challenges.

Our NOC consistently goes the extra mile to remediate issues as quickly as possible. Sometimes this means technicians have to apply their expertise and experience to go beyond standard troubleshooting in order to find a solution. This concept was exemplified earlier this year when our NOC received a call from a customer reporting an issue with a video phone. The user was experiencing poor quality resulting in garbled voice and choppy video.

TECHNICIANS ACCELERATE PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION THROUGH PACKET CAPTURING

Nitel supported three of this customer’s locations, however, the user wasn’t in the one of those supported locations. Instead, it was the CEO who was experiencing poor call quality from his home office. In this instance, the calls had to utilize a public connection to reach the private residence which often results in a degradation of call quality.

Despite the issue occurring at a private residence, our team immediately escalated the issue to one of our senior NOC analysts. After evaluating the situation, the engineering team began to troubleshoot. Collaborative troubleshooting was required on both sides, since the issue was occurring at the CEO’s home. The team conducted data and voice packet captures to identify if the customer was experiencing packet loss or if the packets were arriving out of order, two common causes of poor video and audio quality. Packet capturing is a complex process that goes beyond standard troubleshooting procedures and requires a high level of expertise to execute and analyze.

EQUIPMENT RECONFIGURATION PREVENTS FUTURE ISSUES

Having identified the issue after several hours of troubleshooting, our team made recommendations on how the customer’s equipment should be configured according to our best practices, improving the audio and video quality. The customer was thrilled with the service they received through this process.

Traditionally, tech companies leave something to be desired when it comes to customer support. We have worked to make our NOC experience as quick and seamless as possible, from the moment we answer the phone until the issue has been resolved. We know that the occasional issue is inevitable, whether it be an outage, latency or equipment failure, which may result in a customer contacting our NOC. In a time when pressures are high and your customer is under stress, no one wants to spend hours on the phone dialing through phone trees and repeating their issue to countless representatives. The great service provided by the Nitel NOC is one major reason why customers choose Nitel.

The NOC Team was recognized with a 2021 Stevie Award for Sales & Customer Service for this case study. You can read more about that award here.