3 min read

Five essential things to consider with your support system stack when expanding your fiber network

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Growing a network is a complex and time-consuming task. Too much non-value-added time is often spent dealing with manual processes to add new customers and new services, keeping track of your customers – or using an old customized solution that might not handle all your processes.

Today, customers’ demands have become more imminent as the importance of fiber has increased. People rely on their internet connection, and when they order a new internet – or TV or VoIP – service, they want it fast and stable with minimal interference. We know that this can be hard to manage for a network operator.


Combining large-scale growth with unique customer demands is challenging for companies that want well-received, renowned, and satisfied customers. If you have a network with slow growth and a customer base where you see little changes, it can indeed be managed in manual processes, even though it might be a cumbersome way of work and doesn’t enable you to be set for future challenges.

Companies that choose the best tools for controlling their fulfillment and assurance processes will enjoy a competitive advantage.

 

Five fundamental points to consider 

As we see it, any software solution must consider the degree to which a system can support a company’s strategic and operational goals. To add value to an organization, the solution must meet these goals. Unfortunately, no solution will fix all of your problems, so the clearer your goals are, the easier it will be to choose the perfect solutions for you.  

These are five points to consider to grow your network effectively. 

 

1. Choosing a standard product

Choosing a standard product instead of a customized solution will let you grow with your solution. Customized solutions might work better in the beginning, but when technical demands and organizational needs change, it is often costly to keep up with these demands. However, it is likewise important to choose a software solution that can fit your needs.

 

 2. Automate your services

In order to have a fast time-to-market of new products, a good customer experience, and a fast growth, it’s crucial to automate your common processes to a large extent as possible. Getting the right service to the right customer at the right time might sound easy, but several parameters can get wrong in this process. In addition, an automated process will also always ensure you with a repetitive process that is traceable as well as personally independent.

Also, an automated order process with the possibility to quickly tell the customer which services are available and when they are available is crucial for winning the customer. A new trend we see today is that customers change products and services more often and expect their orders to be fast and immediately ready to use. Here is often room for improvement.

Automation is the foundation of growth, and without automation, your service delivery gets costly, and you might lose customers or not be able to grow as fast as you want. It might feel like a big step to automate your processes, but it doesn’t have to be. In this blog post, you’ll get some insight into the Pros and Cons when thinking about automation.

 

 3. Integrate other tools with your BSS/OSS

Most fiber network owners have a number of software solutions in their stack. No solution handles everything, even if we want it to be that way. Therefore, it’s important to choose a solution open for integration. If not, there is a high risk that you end up in multiple systems that goes out-of-sync with each other, leading to quality problems and issues with training your staff on multiple systems that hinder you from growing.

When choosing a software solution, you should always be sure that this new solution integrates well with other systems and that its APIs are modern and fast.

 

Here’s an example of how Netadmin can be integrated into a system landscape:

 

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4. Make it easy to introduce and change devices in your network

Your preferred BSS/OSS solution should have the capability to store all your devices and resources independently of the vendor. As a network owner, over time, you probably want to have the possibilities to choose the devices you feel most comfortable with. To have control over your network components, spanning from passive equipment like fiber panels to core routers as well as data center entities, is of importance. As opposed to several other inventory systems, the Netadmin Inventory capability focuses on network peripherals, thus making the system more intuitive for its target audience.

 

 5. Make sure that you can detect affected customers when the network fails

Today, your customers expect to have a solid and stable internet connection. If something makes the internet connection fail, they expect you to handle it fast and get it back in order quickly. Having a good assurance process is important when your network fails. Therefore, it’s of high importance that you know which customers are affected and how to get the problem sorted out when an issue occurs. Otherwise, your helpdesk has no idea what they can expect and how to respond to and inform your customers in a successful way.

It is good to have a centralized system where you store all data from which your staff can easily get this information.

We believe network owners should consider these five top aspects when wanting to expand their network or improve their business. You need to have a mindset where you are open to using modern software solutions and understand that doing things manually will, in some way, slow down your ability to grow your network.

Smart companies analyze their software stack and are constantly looking for better solutions. They have their customers in focus when thinking of how they work – because in the end, poorly controlled and managed networks will harm the customers' experience with their fiber connection.

 

 

 

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