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.