Sunrise Telecom survey reveals service providers need to improve field productivity

As the service provider industry consolidates, they not only have to differentiate themselves with new services, but improve how quickly they can perform installation and proactively respond to issues.

A new survey commissioned by Sunrise Telecom (OTC: SRTI) about the state of field operation productivity revealed that service providers recognize that there's a definite connection between field productivity and customer satisfaction and retention.

Not surprisingly, 100 percent of survey participants said that customer satisfaction and retention is important, but only 81 percent of these participants said that improving field productivity is a priority.

"One of the key drivers for cable operators and traditional service providers as they start going after business services and bundling, their question is how can we do it effectively and quickly?," said Bahaa Moukadam, Sunrise Telecom CEO, in a previous interview with FierceTelecom. "At the same time, they don't want to spend a lot of money in an environment where the technology is getting so complicated without corresponding improvements in the skill sets of the technicians.

However, it appears that while a number of service providers recognize the need for improving productivity, a good number of them haven't implemented a plan to achieve that goal. Fifty percent of the survey's respondents said their company has not put together a field operations productivity plan in the past year, and 48 percent said that productivity metrics in their organization are either nonexistent or need vast improvement. 

Two of the issues that were hindering field operations productivity were eliminating repeat service calls and giving field technicians more skills and training.

"By improving the performance of the workforce, service providers will improve the performance of the network because as they find common anomalies they can address those root causes and improve the performance because it will enable them to avoid recurring problems after installation," Moukadam said.

For more:
- see the release

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