Building Customer Centric Command Center at Circles.Life
Written by Junaid Khalid, Engineering Manager, Command Center in Product Engineering
Network operations center (NOC) has been traditionally viewed as a support function to businesses that rely on it in avoiding critical disruptions and subsequent time and revenue losses. Its ability to ensure a smooth network functioning and minimize outages has won it the title of a network curator.
However, the downside of this traditional lense while building NOC can create a disconnect with customers as too much focus is put on network performance and not enough on service performance.
Our obsession of giving power back to the customer led us towards Command Center transformation and enabled us to build a service excellence center that puts customers at its core.
Circles.Life Command Center
This transformation journey didn’t just happen overnight, key factors like dominance of cloud services, need for real-time insights into application , infrastructure & network services and quality of service to become #1 most recommended telco drove us to continue this journey. This new integrated Command Center is consists of:
- Incident Command Center
- Service Operations Center
- Operations Support Center
- Revenue Assurance
Incident Command Center:
The goal of the organizational incident management process is to return the business to normal operations, repair any damage done, recover customer impact, manage and inform all stakeholders through communication protocols.
Later on IC, leads a blameless root cause analysis consisting of 3 to 7 level WHY — WHY analysis and track action items & development needed for corrective and preventive resolution.
This has lead to 95% decrease in overall product and platform defects and errors
Here at Circles, we have automated the entire chain of events that needs to be executed, which leads to a 400% faster Mean Time to Acknowledge , Recover and Resolution and an overall reduction in costs to restore normal business operations.
Operation Support Center:
Operation support center is backbone of Command Center as it plays a vital role in automating and building observability building using i.e. ELK , Nagios, Grafana datadog.
This allowed us to improve our Mean Time to detect to be within seconds and optimize manual monitoring resources by 60%.
Starting from a network or service glitch which happens on cloud or on-premise all events including detection, assignment of severity, opening of a trouble ticket, routing to SME team and notification is done in an automated fashion. This eases the workflow and boosts the problem-solving process as it frees time for engineers to handle more strategic and critical tasks away from the repetitive daily routine. It also enables the tackling of network events during off-hours resulting in refined and more efficient user experience.
Being a customer centric organization , support center also integrates customer reach out tools to organizational incident command center stack
Service Operations Center:
The Service Operations Center focuses on effectively and efficiently delivering customer services and outcomes (SaaS). The team works to continually improve collaboration between Dev and Ops by streamlining operational processes. One of the key objectives is to define, measure and improve SLAs, SLOs, & SLI between Circles & its Partners — this ensures that all customer requirements are met faster, with quality.
Another aspect of Service Assurance is to run the SaaS Service desk in conjunction with other functions of the Command center. Through Service Desk we intend to extend Circle’s Service, Incident & Change Management to our SaaS customers.
Global SOC has been centralized to provide 24x7 monitoring, performance management of the network, applications, servers, databases, firewalls & cloud devices, service availability and system health checks / housekeeping assurance.
Revenue Assurance:
As an MVNO, we rely on MNO in providing us data, voice and SMS services; and puts us in a unique position in which it becomes essential to tap all our usages. This tapping on one hand helps us to reconcile usage between our customers and MNO along with the capability to detect unnoticed or unintended loss of revenue.
This process was started for Singapore in the start of 2020 with a bunch of SQL commands followed by a huge deal of manual efforts by command center engineers on a daily basis to build a statistical analysis based monitoring system. This same model was employed for our other MVNO deployments while continually improving our validations criteria to detect gaps in revenue usages along with decreasing the false positive.
Major process improvement was done on this model when ongoing automation vision was applied on revenue, right from scheduling a query to backend DB till the point data is loaded in our dashboard with all the necessary validations. This entire process was automated, hence raising the problem detection ratio to 90%.
While we continue on a Kaizen journey to future proof and build a customer reliability center, we inculcate one of our key core value in circles
Work Hard. Work Smart. Take Ownership. Keep on learning and keep on Growing helped us push through the tough times and achieve our aspirational ambitions.
