Service-oriented problem solving

A couple of months back, the DSL at my house fizzled over a weekend, with service sporadic to none. On a Sunday, I called Verizon tech support, and the customer service technician walked me through the long process of elimination -- running through a list of procedures to see whether the issue was my problem or their problem. We started with double-checking all the line filters, followed by a series of signal checks that involved disconnecting the wireless router and rebooting the computer. The rep thought that there may be an issue with the modem, and scheduled a live visit from a technician to determine if it was that or something else.

The next day the DSL service seemed to restore itself. Nevertheless, I kept my appointment with the technician to make sure all was okay. He showed up that Tuesday morning, and spent two hours testing the line, and left concluding the problems weren't caused by the modem, but perhaps by the wireless router.

Later that same day, I mentioned to a neighbor that I had a DSL outage, and found out that he, too, had an outage over the same period of time over weekend. And, he, too spent a couple of hours with a technical service rep on Sunday going through the checklist to eliminate all probable causes.

The obvious question is, then, why wasn't Verizon able to connect the dots and see right away that there was a neighborhood-wide issue with the service? Why didn't representatives have access to a common view of all service issues within a common geographic area? Think about all the technical support time invested in duplicate service calls from the same area, not to mention customers' time.

That's a matter Andy Baer, CIO of Comcast discussed at a BEAWorld keynote presentation, noting that Comcast has been employing SOA methodologies to better connect customer service activities, and thus avoid such gaps in analyzing network problems. (Note: I'm not taking sides here with Comcast versus Verizon, as I am a customer of both.) Baer observed that with tens of thousands of technicians on staff, just saving 15 minutes a day in productivity for each would save Comcast $100 million a year.

Baer said the company's 20,000 customer service technicians originally had to look through 10 or more applications to attempt to solve problems. Now, a unified call center and problem resolution portal not only helps its staff save time and money, but the same services are also now made available to technicians over their mobile phones as well as to customers. And -- very important -- the portal includes information about service across the customer's nieghborhood.

Using SOA methodologies involving loosely coupled, coarse-grained services, a team of 25 was able to roll out the entire feature in about five months.

Baer wants to actually cut turnaround times for new offerings from months to 24 hours, using SOA methods. "It sometimes takes six months, or sometimes one year to get a new product out the door," he said. "The goal for our technology team is 24-hour product introductions."