ZTE Global Customer Support Center

With the self-adjustment and development of the global telecom market, Chinese telecom industry has entered a stable growth period when all operators are making efforts to develop services and try new ways of profit-making. ZTE Corporation always pays close attention to the efficiency of its customers´ networks and the possibility of providing new services that can promote the network value. With rich customer service experience, ZTE realized that excellent after-sales services must be the objective for ZTE to strive for, and the bridge for building up a win-win relationship with customers. ZTE Global Customer Support Center was therefore set up.

Service Operation Flow

ZTE Global Customer Support Center was established in October 2002, providing the 24/7 technical support on hot lines and field troubleshooting service with rapid response. With 4 subsidiary centers, several advanced laboratories and a team of qualified technical support engineers, the center handles users technical problems in a centralized mode, and it supervises the whole problem-solving process. The Customer Support Center is composed of more than 70 local hot lines distributed over the world, linking to field technical support engineers, and backup technical support experts. All the technical problems worldwide can enter its tracking system via the Internet. The center enables all the customers of ZTE to enjoy rapid good quality service.

Figure 1 shows the work flow of ZTE Global Customer Support Center.

The center provides the customers on its website with the O&M experiences and the technical materials subscribed by customers. The powerful knowledge database has collected technical manuals of relative products, routine problem solutions, maintenance cases, etc.

The introduction to new software functions and new versions of ZTE products can also be found on the website. Customers can obtain all the information in the form of email, paper materials or CDs, which greatly helps them to keep a network in stable operation and under timely maintenance, and further ensures customers can deliver more network-based application services. In addition, the center launched a periodical named ZTE Maintenance Experience to customers to help them strengthen the maintenance capability.

At present, the knowledge database has become the most commonly used knowledge platform in solving technical problems for customers. The platform is therefore indispensable for the maintenance of ZTE´s products. The database consists of three sub-databases:

(1)General Solution Database

This database includes all kinds of standard solutions and can be used to guide the solution to regular technical problems. The main contents are the equipment O&M manuals, standard solutions to common problems or intrinsic problems of various products.

(2)Experience Solution Database

This database provides answers to difficult problems, containing various kinds of on-site maintenance experiences and skills accumulated by maintenance engineers. If maintenance personnel fail to find solutions in the standard solution database, they can look for answers in this one. The data included comes from product-related maintenance experiences and valuable call logs.

(3)Technical Manual Database

This database provides general knowledge related to ZTE products, consisting of product technical manuals. When a customer needs information about the performance, specifications, and structure of a certain product, he can look them up in this database.

As shown in Figure 2, ZTE Global Customer Support Center has strict operation regulations, clear demarcation of responsibilities and quick and convenient service flow. All departments and staff members concerned are obliged to follow the operation regulations to solve the customers´ problems.

Monitoring, Management and Analysis

ZTE Global Customer Support Center is actually a real time monitoring and tracking system for worldwide service. As shown in Table 2, the troubles reported by the customers will be handled and tracked within a limited time period varying with emergency situations, that is, 3 days for Level 1 troubles, 8 days for Level 2 troubles, 20 days for Level 3 troubles and 40 days for Level 4 troubles, which is already specified in operation regulations. If the troubles reported by the customer cannot be solved in the designated time, the system will automatically give alarms. The center will pay close attention to overtime-unsolved problems, be responsible for contacting the most capable engineers to find best solutions, and abiding by the"escalation"rule advocated by the center.

A variety of resources will be called on to facilitate the solutions at the earliest convenience when necessary. Every solution process is recorded in the global monitoring and tracking system. The department that should take responsibility will be easily found. ZTE Global Customer Support Center is a real time management system for providing quick response to customers´ requirements and appropriate solutions to technical problems.

In order to analyze the performance of ZTE products and be fully aware of the running status of customers´ networks, the monitoring system provides toolkits for making data listings, data statistics, percentage distribution, figure analysis, curve tendency analysis and other reports. This will facilitate the improvement and development of the product performance, helping us fully understand customers´ requirements until they reach their objectives.

Based on the powerful analysis function of the monitoring system, ZTE Global Customer Support Center can make special reports of "ZTE Equipment Running Status Analysis" for customers to analyze the frequency and reason of equipment failure and improve the daily operation and maintenance proficiency, to prevent or reduce the negative effects resulting from faults.