Making quality a managed service provider differentiator
The managed service provider is an IT specialist that operates and manages networks, applications and communications services on behalf of enterprises as defined by contracts with the enterprises they serve. Today, the modern managed service provider faces a tough task as the business environment becomes ever-more competitive and users become ever-more demanding. Customer expectations are constantly on the rise while revenues from communications services fall faster than traffic volume rises. These are the realities demanding innovation among managed service providers. Leading managed service providers are working with Psytechnics to make the disciplines and technologies at the heart of VoIP, IP Telephony and IP video quality a critical on-going differentiator and powerful revenue stream.
Psytechnics enables new managed service provider services and reduces cost of service
Tired of the low cost-low quality service tradeoff, many users are willing to pay more for high quality IP Telephony and IP video services and for leading managed service providers and their customers, Psytechnics is the trusted choice for those interested in making quality an advantage - we support more than 1 million business VoIP and IP video conferencing users today. Our products and services enable new service revenues for the managed service provider by enabling:
| • | New services such as network assessment, auditing, consulting services to assess IP network readiness and ongoing quality of experience monitoring |
| • | Significantly reduced operations, support and SLA penalty costs |
| • | Accelerated network engineer reaction time minimizing service outages |
| • | High confidence in the setting of and compliance with business relevant SLAs |
Psytechnics delivers higher managed service provider revenues through more valuable, high quality VoIP and IP video services with fewer experience-affecting defects and fewer unplanned disconnections.
Psytechnics' technology and experience makes a difference
As experts in the management of VoIP and IP video services including support for migration of services from traditional POTS through IP telephony and ISDN to IP video conferencing to the more feature-rich unified communications services, our real-world customer experience consistently reveals that real time IP communications services are more complex to deliver than their non-real time IP based applications that most IP network engineers are familiar with. Many implementations have failed to deliver customer satisfaction because of inadequate tools, operating and support resource processes and skills required to monitor, diagnose and remediate the dynamic traffic flows of a modern enterprise or service provider converged IP network. Real time traffic introduces new complexities that are compounded when the real time service is IP telephony or video since users are directly affected and have learned to be intolerant of defects affecting their ability to do business.That's why these weaknesses often stop the migration project in its tracks, causing implementation delays, cost overruns, ongoing customer satisfaction issues and if contracted for, triggering of SLA-defined penalties.
In four out of five managed service providers surveyed, Psytechnics found significant avoidable operations costs. Up to 90% of the cost of supporting managed VoIP services was wasted in the incident and problem management processes and resources, trying to manage VoIP quality issues using the wrong tools, inadequate processes and wasted resources.
The effect on the user is equally disturbing as the rate of decay in users’ perception of service quality accelerates the longer a problem remains unresolved. In the recent Omnibos enterprise study, more than two-thirds of IT managers surveyed expressed concern over, or have experienced quality problems with their VoIP service.
Real time visibility of service performance and the user experience
Psytechnics Experience Manager provides the engineering and operations processes, tools and expertise to address the single biggest operational weakness of managed service provider offerings – real time visibility of live IP voice and video communications service performance. Using the advanced perceptual prediction algorithm standardized by the ITU through the contributions of Psytechnics engineers and other unique Psytechnics technologies, the actual service performance delivered per IP stream, per VoIP or IP video session and in real time, enables IT operations and support engineers to proactively monitor the quality of the user experience. With the use of the right resources in the early stage of a problem's life, engineers can virtually eliminate the typical escalations and costly 'all-hands-on-deck' approaches of legacy 'fire fighting' methodologies.Pre-empting and remediating problems BEFORE they become service affecting is a major innovation in service delivery. When problems do occur, the diagnostic information provided by Pystechnics Experience Manager enables the right resource to be deployed and the right remediation to effect a fix that is "right, first time".
Faster repairs lead to payback within as little as 6 months
Consider the effects before-and-after of a recent managed service provider deployment of Psytechnics Experience Manager. By delivering real time visibility into network incidents and providing immediately actionable accurate evidence to the support teams, incidents were resolved 'Right First Time' eliminating the support call bounce-back and fundamentally changing the economics of support services.By increasing the productivity of support staff, the Psytechnics Experience Manager greatly expands the ratio of number of IP phones to support staff, reducing the total support cost and the support cost per IP phone. Giving the network monitoring staff the information they need to perform diagnosis and remediation quickly and reliably reduced the mean time to repair in this managed service provider by approximately 90% and greatly improved customer satisfaction.
As this managed service provider case shows, Psytechnics technology and services were able to improve managed service provider productivity, reducing cost so that the payback period of the initial investment was achieved in less than six months.
Customers speak for themselves
Kelly Westerfield, director of network delivery for IBM network services, in a press interview said: "We had to find a more efficient way to manage IP telephony call quality. We had to automate what was becoming a very manual, reactive, time-consuming and costly process. We had to address this so that we could provide a higher level of voice service to our customers and manage our costs"."Psytechnics gives us the ability to understand poor voice-call quality in real time and then helps us understand what is causing the problem and where. In most cases call quality issues are identified and resolved before the user is aware of them. Without Psytechnics we would be aware of some types of voice quality issues only when the user reported them."