By Andrew Joseph Milley, Cox Communications Inc
The year is 2019 and service providers now have more data on every aspect of our business than ever before. Specifically, every piece of equipment in our network and customers’ homes can be measured for performance and often issues can be solved or mitigated through remote action. It is not only interesting but is becoming necessary for service providers to leverage this data in new and novel ways to identify problems, make decisions and act proactively to solve problems. This capability to solve customer impacting equipment issues in real-time, or “proactive customer maintenance,” is rapidly moving from a competitive advantage to business as usual.
Data analytics plays a key part in this process, which can include advanced modelling techniques like machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, the most effective solutions are often born from a combination of deep technological insight, rapid data enablement, and simple but powerful logic to empower the right action at the right time. Whether the output is a remote command, work recommendation, or even a proactive customer notification, speed to solution is the single most important aspect of a value-add system for proactive customer maintenance.
This paper will cover the general strategy of delivering proactive customer maintenance, that is, proactive and real-time efforts focused on providing ongoing excellent performance for every customer in our network, leveraging data and automation. It will cover the background and history of such efforts at Cox Communications Inc. (CCI) as well as current efforts. Finally, it will discuss the part that data analytics and emerging technologies plays in these efforts. Where noted some descriptions of these efforts has been left intentionally vague due to IP concerns, but concepts and results will be shown.