Managing Your Trouble Tickets

Many carriers are efficient, but the reality is that you are one of the tens, hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of customers the carrier has. It’s common to have a 2,000-to-1 ratio of customers to customer service reps at a carrier. If you have dedicated circuits and bill several thousand dollars a month, you might receive some added support, but the ratio is rarely much better for big-time customers than it is for individuals or small businesses. With this information in mind, you can easily understand that your trouble tickets will get quicker resolution if you manage them yourself.

The format you use to manage your trouble tickets can be as complex and structured as you want. You can build a large relational database that tracks trouble tickets by carrier, issue type, start date, mean time to repair, and resolution, or you can go for something less structured. The least-technical way to manage your trouble tickets is to simply write down your call example and all the information you need to open the ticket on a piece of paper, and update it with times you called in and the status you were given. This information allows you to track how long the ticket has been open, and to track its progress. Of course, you might want to type this information and save it electronically just in case it gets thrown away with the other scraps on your desk.

 Tip  If telecom isn’t your main job, you might only open one trouble ticket a year, but if you expect to open one trouble ticket every month or week, consider creating your own trouble ticket form. In fact, I have included a really cool trouble ticket form in the Cheat Sheet of this book to get you started.

Understanding the timelines

Carriers have their own standard timelines for responding to issues, based on the severity of the issue. If you have one phone number in Minnesota that you can’t get through to, the carrier’s internal policy may be to provide you with a callback on the status of the issue within four hours. If the DS-3 circuit is down and you have no phone service, the standard time for a callback might be two hours.

 Remember  Carriers typically won’t give you an escalation until they have failed to respond to you in the standard interval, although local carriers are much stricter on these timelines than long-distance carriers.

That doesn’t mean that your carrier will solve your problem in two to four hours; it simply means that you will receive a callback from a technician in that amount of time. I do recommend escalating trouble tickets if they don’t experience any progress. If you have additional information about a problem, you can always call back into your carrier and update the ticket with the new call example or results of a test. This is a very good way to ask for updates without sounding pushy.

Coping with large outages

There isn’t a network in North America that has not had a substantial outage. The source might be a fiber cut, a computer virus, or simply the growing pains of integrating a new technology like VoIP into their POPs. (By the way, a fiber cut is exactly what it sounds like — a cut cable causes a catastrophic loss of phone service.) When these problems hit, they are big, fast, and will generally take at least five hours to fix. Software issues that clog a carrier’s internal network can take anywhere from one hour to five days to completely fix and are difficult to pin down. The mercurial nature of software issues makes any estimated time to repair dodgy, at best. Your best bet in these scenarios is simply to call in every hour or so for updates. The story can and will change as it goes along, and you will at least be informed about the progress.

A day in the life of a fiber cut

Fiber cuts are more tangible than other issues, so carriers can typically provide realistic timelines for repair. The greatest anxiety is waiting for the technicians to be dispatched and find the cut. If the cut occurred close to a large town, the technicians might be on site in 30 minutes. If it was in a rural area, it might take three hours. After technicians are on site, your carrier should be able to give you an estimate on the time to repair. For a simple fiber cut, the technicians have to trace the cables back from the split and dig down to find an undamaged section of the fiber to splice on a new section of cable. When one side is connected to the new cable, the technicians then have to dig another trench on the other side of the cut to expose the fiber and then begin splicing the new section of cable onto it. If you estimate one or two hours per side to dig each trench and splice the new cable, you should be in the right ballpark. Now, if there are extenuating circumstances and the fiber cut is the result of flooding that eroded a hillside, which exposed and shredded a mile-long section of fiber, you can expect a much greater time for repair.