Cisco Systems, St Leonards, Australia

Name of Organization / Company: Cisco Systems, St Leonards, Australia

Category: Award for the Innovation in Technology Development > Computer Industries

Entry Title: Cisco ProCallMe

Entry:

Executive Summary:

Cisco is pioneering a solution called ‘virtual Managed Service as a service (vMSaaS)’. In such a service model, incident management requires the engineer to restore the network services AND inform and notify the customer of all critical incidents within agreed service level agreements.

To address this requirement, specific to Telstra, Cisco APAC TAC came up with an innovative solution to proactively monitor the critical incident and notify the customer automatically in less than 2 minutes, by phone call and by email, without any human intervention. This innovation saves crucial minutes and allows the engineer to concentrate on restoring services within agreed timeframes.

Challenge & Opportunity:

24/7 proactive network monitoring allows issues in our customers’ networks to be found and many times fixed even before the customer has seen them. The challenge for Cisco is to restore services and notify our customers that there is a network issue within pre-defined service level agreements.

In this vMS Service solutionCisco is required to notify the customer for all Proactive P1 & P2 incidents within 12 minutes and 20 minutes respectively. The notification has been defined as a phone call by the Cisco engineer with the incident number followed by an email containing the problem description, business impact, region affected and workaround/action taken.

The email notification needs to be sent for every hour until service is restored. The customer operations team then update their tools, management and the end users about the critical incident.

These times are extremely tight for an engineer to accept and understand the case before the customer can be notified via phone and email. During these first few minutes it is critical for the engineer to be focusing on issue resolution.

Action Taken:

The Cisco APAC TAC decided to automate the customer notification so that the engineer can keep focusing on troubleshooting the issues and restoring the services.

ProCallMe was created with the power of Big Data Broker, Borg and Tropo(Cloud based API) which will automate the customer notification within agreed timelines.

ProCallMe performs the following task 24/7 without any human intervention:

1 Proactively monitors the VMS queue. It looks for new P1/P2 Service Requests and also for Service Requests whose severity is being upgraded to P1/P2.
2 Once the SR/event is identified, a text message is created with data from the Cisco Case Management platform.
3 The message is converted to speech.
4 A phone call is made to the customer and the speech is delivered in an Australian accent.
5 If the customer does not pick the call, the script can detect a voice mail and leave a voicemail after the beep.
6 An email follows with the subject and body in the format agreed with the customer. The email includes problem description, business impact and region affect
7 An email is also sent to engineer that the phone call and email notification is completed.

All the above in just 2 minutes of the case being created and it works 24*7 without any human intervention, allowing the engineer to focus on issue resolution.

Resulting Impact:

ProCallMe was demonstrated to the customer and they loved it. ProCallMe is now operational in the production environment, it allows Cisco to meet our notification SLA (12mins for P1 and 20mins for P2), simplifies a process for the engineer, enabling them to focus on restoring the services.

This is a yet another example from Cisco Technical Services on providing industry best customer experience and legendary customer service.