Dumbfounded! Will smart phones immobilize wireless carriers? Part I: identifying the vulnerabilities

America's Network, March 1, 2004 by David Chamberlain

EXPENSIVE PROBLEMS

The carriers claim that once the customer reaches tech support, there's nothing new about supporting smart phones. All say that they have been doing it for several years and have experienced technical support staff members who receive training in specific handsets weeks before they ever get into customers' hands.

Sprint's tech support starts with the hiring process. Deeanne King, director, human resources development, says the carriers seek out skilled IT professionals. "When we hire people for these technical applications, we look for people with an IT background and experiences and successes," she says.

Training for tech support reps includes a lot of hands-on experience as well. "We let our people have a chance to test and experience and use the technology," King says. "They know how to locate information from Palm and Microsoft and they can check out a phone and try to reproduce the problem in a live environment."

Even with live phones, live data and a live network, it's not always possible for the tech support rep to reproduce the problem. Then what?

Some problems can't be identified, much less solved, by a customer service representative on the phone. Those are the sorts of problems that really could dumbfound the carriers--or at least cause costs to skyrocket. In those cases, the unit may need to be returned to the carrier and a replacement shipped.

Intuwave's Richard Seward notes that the cost of a returned handset can quickly exceed $100 because of overnight shipping charges, packaging and tech support time and the bench technician who has to inspect the unit. Seward illustrates the problem with a story about a friend who returned two Orange SPVs (Windows Mobile handset sold in the U.K.) because the battery life was so short. It was only after complaining to several friends that she realized she had left Bluetooth enabled continuously, which reduced standby time dramatically.

How can a customer service rep find a problem like that without actually seeing the phone? By viewing into the phone from a distance. At least two companies offer tools for customer support reps to look at the phone setup and take corrective action over the air, without a potentially expensive visit to the company store.

Ian Collins, CEO of Mobile Diagnostix, a startup outside Ontario, Canada, found that technical support reps typically spend a large portion of each call simply determining the configuration of the handset, which features and applications are loaded, and how networking parameters are set up. Mobile Diagnostix provides a way for the carrier's support reps to query the phone and view its parameters without asking the customer to read data from several different screens and menus.

DIAGNOSTIC AID

Once a problem is identified, the CSR can send an update to the phone correcting the problem. Collins points out that some troubleshooting takes one-tenth of the time of traditional methods.

Behind the CSR's screen is a rules-based system similar to that already used by carrier billing systems. If the system identifies a known problem from the phone parameters, it can immediately prompt the CSR to send the appropriate update. If more in-depth troubleshooting is required, the results are added to the database. This has the effect, Collins says, of allowing carriers to hire and train fewer CSRs having IT or networking experience to support smart phones.