Quote:
Originally Posted by General Maximus
this is the argument I have always had with them before. How does an outage/area fault get identified if every person when you ring up is adamant there is isn't a problem and just want to book a tech? (or worse, comes up with some ****** "you've got a virus excuse")
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Quote:
Originally Posted by japitts
Presumably "the system" picks up numerous tech-visits booked in the same street/sector/cab/whatever and flags this somehow..
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Bingo!
There are multiple systems in place to detect outages, but they each do a better job in specific instances.
Modems go on and offline all the time, so a single modem going off means nothing. If 100 drop off, well that's different.
However it's not always so cut and dry. Sometimes modems connect but get no throughput, so reconnect. The system doesn't see 100 modems going off, it sees a few coming and going and doesn't raise it (or it does raise it but someone determines it's not outage worthy just yet).
So you call up, little agent sees there's no outage - but guess what,
he doesn't have the authority to raise an outage. He's not trained enough for this because it's not always clear how outagey and outage really is, or how large an area is affected. Instead, he books a tech, because that's what he's trained to do. If he's on the ball, he'll tell you "I'm going to book you an engineer for Monday, but chances are it'll get picked up and fixed before then and you'll be notified by sms", but don't count on that. His process says to book a tech.
Now another system comes into play. Internally, Virgin has a bunch of area codes. This isn't the same code as on your bill, your area code might be something like CCC0 JDA1. A bit like a post code, but post codes aren't necessarily a good indication of an area, as one postcode might be serviced by several nodes, or conversely one node might service several postcodes. So seeing 10 techs booked for L15 means nothing,but seeing 3 techs booked for WA3 could mean something. In any case, postcodes mean nothing, they go by the node references. The automated system will have a rough idea of how many customers are on a certain node. CCC0 JDA1 might be just 10 customers, CCC0 JDA* might be 15 customers but the system roughly knows this. A bit like post codes, it's not always clear cut doing it by eye, in different parts of the network, F013 *** might only be 15 customers and LL12 4414 could be 300.
In any case, the system picks up the number of techs booked over nodes, compares it to the number of customers on those nodes and sends an alert when it hits a threshold (Last I recall, it was about 10%). This alert doesn't immediately raise an outage, it sends it to someone who's more qualified to double check and actually raise it (This was my job). This is why sometimes, even though it's "obviously" an outage, it takes time to raise - the node references don't always go down to a clean number, sometimes it takes 20 techs being booked before it'll get flagged, because either the node reference doesn't boil down to a small enough number, or because the outage is affecting a fairly wide area at a time when most people are at work (And thus haven't called in).
The automated system here isn't great, it can sometimes raise flags when there's no case for an outage (Remember, only 3 people serviced by a node and 1 tech is booked? Outage or not?) so there's an element of investigation required. It might be an outage in that it's not the customer's premises that's at fault, but unless people call in and book techs, there's no way of knowing for sure.
Once the investigation bit is done, they'll raise the outage and cancel all of the techs booked. The decent agents will leave techs that have been booked before the outage has started, as no doubt regular faults will have happened as well, but sometimes they get cancelled in the process. They'll send you an SMS or voicemail to confirm that it has been cancelled, but when I did this it was an entirely manual process of literally copying out numbers from accounts, pasting them into an SMS tool and hitting "Send". I hope it's automated these days.
Anyway, it usually takes techs being booked to alert the system. They monitor all sorts of things, like if there's a spike in calls or whatever, but the techs being booked is the biggest smoking gun. Once the outage is raised, Virgin will regularly sweep the pools to ensure agents haven't booked more techs and cancel them.
TL;DR - Even if you're
sure it's an outage but the agent isn't sure, book the bloody tech. It's the fastest way to get it fixed. If people don't book techs, outages aren't always raised. If outages aren't raised, things don't get fixed.
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