dtac introduces dSmart solution to improve customer experience

dtac today announced its deployment of ‘dSmart’, a solution that enables it to monitor network performance and customer experience from a single center. The move aims to deliver the greatest satisfaction to customers as problems can be solved at much faster speed.


Tore Johnsen, Chief Executive Officer of Total Access Communication Public Company Limited (dtac), said dtac implemented HP’s dSmart, the solution that comprises of a set of “off-the-shelf” standard applications to speed delivery of services and improve service quality on the back of BT850 million budget.

dSmart is a one-stop and comprehensive network monitoring and service management system that comes with customer experience management solution.

Installed at dtac’s Service Operation Center (SOC), a consolidation of dtac’s five network operations monitoring centers, dSmart enables dtac staff to view of all incidents and problem, no matter if it comes from an IT fault, a network fault or a customer complain in a real-time manner. The system gives tools to help assess the root cause to a problem faster, helps it fix the problem faster, and reduces the outage time and the customer impact.

dtac considers the spending as its long-term investment. It intends to improve customer services, reduces the duplication of work and increase efficiency. This will finally become its main strategy for customer retention and the strength that will certainly underlie its competitiveness.

“We are the first operator in Thailand and the first company in Telenor Group to implement a customer experience management solution. Under the present economic circumstances, all organizations place importance on cost efficiency and dtac is among them. However, when it comes to the greatest benefits of customers, this investment is what we are willing to make to guarantee that we can ensure utmost satisfaction for all customers. Importantly, as saturation is leading mobile phone business to new forms of competition, we need to be more customer-centric, focusing on giving the best service to customer. This system will enable us to efficiently meet the increasing and more complicated demands of customers,” Tore said.

Rolf Marthinusen, Chief Technology Officer of dtac, said that the system was developed to create the real-time and automatic management of networks and services. It is aimed at speeding up solutions when customers confront problems in using services.

dSmart increases the potential and capacity of dtac in supervising and monitoring its networks, solving problems faster and preventing them from affecting users. Earlier, network-related data had to be supervised through 20-30 monitors. Today SOC officials can see all the data on a single screen and thus solve customers’ problems faster and more efficiently. For example, if a customer has a problem of EDGE/GPRS connection, officials can find out right away if it results from a network or a wrong mobile phone setting and recommend a solution in no time. If a connection problem results from a network, the system will report the incident on screen automatically so that officials can analyze the problem and solve it before a customer is affected.

“Our goal is to halve the time we need to solve problems in networks. dSmart increases the visibility of overall problems. It enables the monitoring of network performances and thus results in the fast prevention of problems. It also helps analyze the networks and facilitates early plans to service the networks. All these meet our demands to provide customers with positive experiences,” Rolf said.

Dr. Beng Teck Liang, Managing Director of Hewlett-Packard (Thailand) Ltd. said that dtac’s objectives are centered on lowering cost and improving customer service and quality. With HP NGOSS, network and IT processes are streamlined and automated, resulting in savings in dtac’s operational expenditure.

dSmart solution is the HP NGOSS solutions supported by HP Solutions Consulting Services provides dtac with a single view to enable prioritization of business requests and network incident that drives better customer service and business outcomes. By adopting a proactive and automated approach towards the infrastructure and IT management, and coupled with Arantech’s Customer Experience Management touchpointtm system, dtac can effectively identify and rectify problems in real time and in an automated fashion before they occur or impact business and customers.

HP Solutions Consulting Services (SCS) helped dtac define its business and operational needs, focusing on the optimum OSS organization, process and solutions set. SCS also provided project governance throughout the deployment. dtac took advantage of HP COSMOS, a repository of methodologies, best practices and intellectual property gained from more than 400 OSS deployments worldwide.

To enhance the delivery of quality services to dtac’s 19 million customers, HP has integrated the service operation center and network control centre into a one-stop service centre, helping dtac achieve a double-digit reduction in OPEX overhead. In addition, dtac also saw a reduction in operational cost for streamlining and automation of the network and IT management and processes.

“dtac is also able to proactively identify the system or connectivity issues and rectify the problems in real time before it affects the customers. This results in greater customer satisfaction,” Dr. Beng said.

For more photos of dtac's Service Operation Center (SOC), click http://www.dtac.co.th/eng/news/soc.php
About dtac

Total Access Communication Public Company Limited (dtac) is a leading mobile phone operator in Thailand, serving 19.3 million phone numbers to customers (as of third quarter). It was founded in August 1989 and it has been operating as a leading mobile phone operator in the country since then. For more information, please visit www.dtac.co.th.
About HP

HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.
The dSmart solution consists of 6 main modules as follows.

- Fault Management boosts monitoring efficiency, enables the visibility of overall problems and discovers the root causes of problems. Consequently problems can be detected and solved quickly.

- Inventory Management System handles unusual incidents. It records every unusual incident so dtac knows what in its systems cause a problem to customers. This allows efficient inventory management.

- Trouble Ticketing System helps cope with the incidents or problems that occur within dtac’s systems or with customers. It also covers the workflow of the company because it enables officials to monitor the status of a problem from the time of detecting the problem to the complete solution of the problem (life cycle). This shortens times needed for solutions.

- Performance Management enables the monitoring of dtac’s network efficiency and quality. It helps us foresee problems before they really happen and affect customers.

- Customer Experience Management helps provide customers with quality services and efficiently check the transmission of voices and data via mobile phones. It can look into the services that customers use when they encounter the problems of signals and mobile phone connectivity. This enables officials to identify the right causes of problems and solve them before customers are aware of any difficulty.

- International Direct Dialling helps monitoring both Outbound and Inbound customer including the customers who make the international call via dtac International Direct Dialling Service. Moreover, This tool also collect all performance data of our of dtac Carrier to ensure their service's reliability and according to the agreed Service Level Agreement.

3G technology and apps already in place

       Although further delays and unclear legal issues continue to hamper the roll-out of 3G in Thailand, it has already been proved that the devices and applications can support the technology. Only network readiness is missing.
       In the seminar "Business Development in Cloud Computing and 3G Technology" by University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, DTAC's Thinakorn Thianprathum said that currently Thailand has 15 million devices ready to connect to mobile wireless broadband networks. The figure is comprised of 10 million installed base computers and 5 million 3G-enabled phones. But there is no available commercial service yet.
       When the network becomes available,it will encourage business development in many areas, especially mobile advertising and internet payments.
       In an existing example, some mobile operators in the UK offer free airtime or text messages to users in return for them accepting mobile advertising.
       It is possible that the system can learn user behaviour and send advertising that suits the individual as well as open more opportunities to sell to target audiences,including traditional media providers.
       Supreecha Limpikanjanakowit, Managing Director of Advanced mPay under AIS, added that when combining broadband and cloud computing technology,IT costs can be significantly reduced because users can use 3G devices to access applications on the cloud.
       Using software as a service will help businesses reduce license costs with a pay-per-use model and standardising IT in the organisation, while scaling use of software can help align business growth.
       That can help businesses stay in touch with the public as well as stimulate internet payments.
       Kittipong Tameyapradit, Senior Executive Vice President at ToT Corpor-ation, said 3G services will enable a better quality of life, especially in distance learning and tele-healthcare in rural areas where Wi-Max and Fiber to the node technology is not suitable or incurs a higher cost of implementation.
       Meanwhile, Peerapol Chatanantavej,True Move's assistant director of 3G marketing, said there are many applications offering consumers a safer and more convenient way to connect wirelessly.
       For example, consumers can use a 3G camera home monitor with built-in 3G sim which can connect to live views and record movements at their home at any time. Or the 3G door phone, which can snap a visitor's picture and send it to the owner via MMS.
       "The door phone can initiate a VDO call to the homeowner if they're not at home," said Peerapol.
       He continued that consumers could also use 3G Wi-Fi routers to share small wireless groups instantly or use 3G Fem-tocell, which acts like a small home base station allowing users to connect to nearby wireless services with an ADSL broadband router.
       Pathom Indarodom, General Manager,AR Information & Publications, shared his view that 3G services in Thailand will help stimulate digital content business opportunities, especially in business applications such as push mail.
       He said wireless broadband will encourage more new services and a 5-10 percent increase in online advertising revenue - although this figure is still behind the global average increase of 20-30 percent.
       The company expects that within two years, 50 percent of notebooks and netbooks will be 3G-enabled, increasing to 70 percent within 5 years. Today, just 5 percent are 3G-ready.
       "Studies show that if 3G is made available in Thailand, it will help boost gross domestic product growth by around 0.3-1 percent," Pathom noted.

Magnificent seven

       In the most important, most revered event since the invention of the brontosaurus trap,Microsoft shipped the most incredibly fabulous operating system ever made; the release of Windows 7 also spurred a new generation of personal computers of all sizes at prices well below last month's offers.The top reason Windows 7 does not suck: There is no registered website called Windows7Sucks.com
       Kindle e-book reader maker Amazon.com and new Nook e-book reader vendor Barnes and Noble got it on; B&N got great reviews for the "Kindle killer"Nook, with dual screens and touch controls so you can "turn" pages, plays MP3s and allows many non-B&N book formats, although not the Kindle one;Amazon then killed the US version of its Kindle in favour of the international one, reduced its price to $260(8,700 baht), same as the Nook; it's not yet clear what you can get in Thailand with a Nook, but you sure can't (yet) get much, relatively speaking, with a Kindle;but here's the biggest difference so far,which Amazon.com has ignored: the Nook lets you lend e-books to any other Nook owner, just as if they were paper books; the borrowed books expire on the borrower's Nook in two weeks.
       Phone maker Nokia of Finland announced it is suing iPhone maker Apple of America for being a copycat; lawyers said they figure Nokia can get at least one, probably two per cent (retail) for every iPhone sold by Steve "President for Life" Jobs and crew via the lawsuit,which sure beats working for it -$6 (200 baht) to $12(400 baht) on 30 million phones sold so far, works out to $400 million or 25 percent of the whole Apple empire profits during the last quarter;there were 10 patent thefts, the Finnish executives said, on everything from moving data to security and encryption.
       Nokia of Finland announced that it is one month behind on shipping its new flagship N900 phone, the first to run on Linux software; delay of the $750(25,000 baht) phone had absolutely no part in making Nokia so short that it had to sue Apple, slap yourself for such a thought.
       Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web, said he had one regret:the double slash that follows the "http:"in standard web addresses; he estimated that 14.2 gazillion users have wasted 48.72 bazillion hours typing those two keystrokes, and he's sorry; of course there's no reason to ever type that, since your browser does it for you when you type "www.bangkokpost.com" but Tim needs to admit he made one error in his lifetime.
       The International Telecommunication Union of the United Nations, which doesn't sell any phones or services, announced that there should be a mobile phone charger that will work with any phone; now who would ever have thought of that, without a UN body to wind up a major study on the subject?;the GSM Association estimates that 51,000 tonnes of chargers are made each year in order to keep companies able to have their own unique ones.
       The Well, Doh Award of the Week was presented at arm's length to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; the group's deputy secretary-general Petko Draganov said that developing countries will miss some of the stuff available on the Internet if they don't install more broadband infrastructure; a report that used your tax baht to compile said that quite a few people use mobile phones but companies are more likely to invest in countries with excellent broadband connections; no one ever had thought of this before, right?
       Sun Microsystems , as a result of the Oracle takeover, said it will allow 3,000 current workers never to bother coming to work again; Sun referred to the losses as "jobs," not people; now the fourth largest server maker in the world, Sun said it lost $2.2 billion in its last fiscal year; European regulators are holding up approval of the Oracle purchase in the hope of getting some money in exchange for not involving Oracle in court cases.
       The multi-gazillionaire and very annoying investor Carl Icahn resigned from the board at Yahoo ; he spun it as a vote of confidence, saying current directors are taking the formerly threatened company seriously; Yahoo reported increased profits but smaller revenues in the third quarter.
       The US House of Representatives voted to censure Vietnam for jailing bloggers; the non-binding resolution sponsored by southern California congresswoman Loretta Sanchez said the Internet is "a crucial tool for the citizens of Vietnam to be able to exercise their freedom of expression and association;"Hanoi has recently jailed at least nine activists for up to six years apiece for holding pro-democracy banners. Iran jailed blogger Hossein "Hoder" Derakshan for 10 months - in solitary confinement.

MAXIS TO RELIST IN SE ASIA'S BIGGEST IPO

       Maxis, Malaysi's top mobile operator, is tipped to receive a warm welcome back to the bourse this month in an IPO worth around $3.43 billion (Bt114.8 billion), billed as the biggest in Southeast Asia's history.
       Maxis, controlled by reclusive Malaysian tycoon Anada Krishnan and Saudi Telecom, is launching the initial public offering (IPO) on Bursa Malasia two years after it was taken private and de-listed.
       It is offering 2.25 billion, or 30 per cent, of its shares at an indicative price of 5.20 ringgit which would raise 11.7 billion ringgit (Bt114.8 billion). Most of the shares will go to institutional investors.
       Nazir Razak, group chief executive of CIMB which is the principal adviser fot he listing exercise, said the IPO will be the biggest in Southeast Asian history.
       Parent company Maxis communications is expected to deploy the proceeds of the sale, slated for November 19, on funding expansion, and to reduce debt.
       The listing includes only Maxis's Malaysian mobile business and excludes its ventures in India and Indonesia which remain under Maxis Communications, the unlisted parent company.
       Alliance Research said Maxis remains the leading mobile operator in Malaysia in both the prepaid and post-paid segments with some 11.4 million subscriptions as at tne of the first half of 2009.
       Its post-paid segment holds a thumping 46.4 per cent of the market, but Alliance said the business had "limited growth prospects, without overseas operations".