1. WHITEPAPER / JANUARY 2014
End-to-End Ticketing for Care
Attaining customer satisfaction
through intelligent analytics
Myles Kennedy, Product Consultant – REV2

2. Introduction
Customer Care has historically evolved as an adjunct to other business concerns. Despite the fact
that Care is a key customer contact point for Operators, there is an extremely high degree of
difficulty associated with establishing an informed dialog. The expanded customer offering has
resulted in the Services themselves becoming increasingly complex, with the infrastructure in
place to support operations following suit.
Hindered by a crippling maze of esoteric coding and processes, many operators today face the
challenge of relying on workflows spanning multiple ticket systems. They are finding that
operations suffer in the areas of Customer Communications, Detecting and Fixing Issues,
Achieving Closures, and the ability to support Organizational Learning.
Useful troubleshooting information is often split across multiple locations, so it is difficult to
coordinate collaborative cross-function activities and research. As Figure 1 shows, multiple ticket
systems contribute to problems in three areas:
1. Between front-end and back-end systems (hand-off problems, HO), causing operations to
slow down and increasing the risk of information loss.
2. Between parallel channels (cross-channel problems, CH), where customers may end up in
an incorrect channel initially and experience problems as they get moved to other
channels at a later stage.
3. Between ticketing systems where it is desired to be able to perform some form of problem
correlation (correlation problems, CX).
Figure 1: Key problem areas with multiple ticket systems.

3. Given the above, we need a simple method to
effectively track the customer journey through
services while allowing for timely communication
with the customer.
Using principals from Customer Journey Mapping
(see sidebar) we developed a single resource that
will be used as the main point to capture dialog
known as End-to-End Ticketing.
Drivers of End-to-End Ticketing
The raison d'être for end-to-end ticketing is that it
allows a consistent Customer Care dialog. It supports
the requirements of an informed, responsive and
comprehensive communication with customers
engaged through Care.
Effective communications require active listening.
This means not only being able to fully capture and
understand customer incidents they themselves
report, but also being sensitive to incidents that
occur that the customer may not yet be aware of.
This includes being prepared to warn customers
ahead of potential problems, something Operators
have typically shied away from doing and which
marks a significant change in perspective when it
comes to engaging in these dialogs.
Customers depend on Operators for solutions to
complex problems they often don’t understand and
which are hard to describe. The End-to-End ticket
provides value here in three ways:
1. It enables customers to get the solutions they need, regardless of the method they
employ to interact with operators: by phone, online via email or chat, or in stores.
There is a good analogy with the shipping industry. Although it is now common practice to
arrange your shipment entirely online, you have the options of walking into a shop or
making arrangements on the phone. Supporting multiple channels, including the
subsequent publishing of status updates (via a specific medium and with varying levels of
granularity) goes a long way to differentiate competitors in this market.
2. “Complex” tickets almost always require a handoff from a primary (front-line) agent to a
secondary (back-line) agent. This typically has high risk for information being lost and
customers having to furnish it again. Handoffs also result in increased turnaround time
from the customer’s perspective, particularly in scenarios where there are delays in
getting a secondary agent to make contact. Advanced customers anticipate this, and will
tend to be frustrated by having to initially be processed by a front-line.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer Journey Mapping is a
technique where the service
provider puts themselves in the
customer’s shoes in order to
understand all touch points
where the customer is engaged
through the customer lifecycle.
It is intended to help identify
those ‘critical moments of truth’
that occur, and identify where
service improvements can be
achieved.
It is fundamentally about
stepping back to actively design
the moments where there is
customer interaction, from the
perspective that matters most:
the customer’s.
It ultimately allows the Operator
to follow a script during
customer engagements. The
script takes into account
customer’s actions, their
motivations, questions and the
barriers they might encounter.

4. An end-to-end ticket helps streamline this activity. It preserves pertinent information and
helps to minimize customer frustrations when their problem is handed-off.
3. By ensuring that a shared ticket is made available throughout the operations chain, the
ticket itself becomes the logical place to store relevant information that is typically used to
support troubleshooting activities. Each division in the Operations chain has traditionally
turned to its own set of reports and tools to perform its function. An end-to-end ticket
provides an opportunity to leverage these information silos and practices throughout the
interaction.
One common scenario today is that work orders are prepared as blank sheets of paper.
Engineers set out with a basic idea of the customer’s problem but tend to start diagnostic
analysis from scratch. Fortunately, the ability to pre-load work orders with relevant
intelligence has been shown to dramatically improve the hit rate of work orders. It is
common practice for some Operators to do this type of preparation for repeat work
orders, where the importance of success becomes that much more critical.
A Definition
We can define an End-to-End ticket as one master ticket spanning the lifecycle of the interaction.
It starts with the occurrence of an incident, whether the Operator detects this incident
themselves or the impacted customer contacts us about it. The ticket ends when the incident is
resolved, this being achieved when our testing confirms it is solved and we have allowed a decay
timer to expire.
The ticket is used by any front-line (customer-facing) system or staff. This includes Care agents,
but also automated systems such as the IVR which can have its behavior modified with respect to
messaging to the customer.
What Should be Included in the End-to-End Ticket?
There is much available information in the organization that might be selected for inclusion in an
end-to-end ticket. It is important to ensure that this information is presented in a level of detail
and language that is usable by the agents. Throughout the workflow, the agent in communication
with the customer at any particular point in time must be able to interpret and use this
information to support their dialog.
The following list is not exhaustive, but provides a sample of the type of information to consider.
Of course, each customer environment will bring its own requirements.
Core Ticket Information
Ticket, Customer, Account and Subscribed Services
Events
DVR Plays and Errors
VOD Purchase Events, Plays and Errors
STB Aggregator Events
CDR Events
CM Events (including change events, flap reports, etc).
IVR ‘arrival’ events
IVR ‘progress’ events
Bill Payments

5. Request-for-Credit events
Provisioning Events (Services, Devices, IDs)
Customer Configuration Change events
Interactions
Web portal logins (customer search topics)
Customer Self-Care Logs
Customer Contact History
Situational Awareness
Top-10 reporting for reboots, etc.
Service Outage Data (posted outage events and related status events)
Social Media Events
Marketing Activities
Telemetry
Realtime house poll results
Realtime Neighborhood poll results
Network: Node health status
Key Operational Metrics
Implementing an End-to-End Ticket System
To implement an End-to-End ticket system, you will typically need to follow these seven steps:
1 Create a key stakeholders working group that brings together representatives from
each of the contact points and contributors to the end-to-end ticket content.
2 Understand the customer journey. To do this, conduct customer research, preferably
using ethnographic-style interview techniques and in-context observations in place of
surveys and focus groups, which tend to not deliver the relevant detail critical to
understanding customer experience.
3 Conduct a Business Process Analysis to understand the workflow within the
organization and where the delta exists between this and an ideal Customer Journey
experience. Start documenting and testing use-cases.
4 Rationalize codes and terminology used across the organization. Leverage best
practices and available industry information architectures in these areas. Techniques
such as CHU modeling (see sidebar) can be employed to ensure that the cross-channel
requirements are fully captured and the information modeling is robust enough to
support all use cases.
5 Audit and agree on what information to include in the tickets, including available
telemetry, customer account and billing data, outage, service performance and
marketing information. Consultation with the data owners in respective areas will
reveal what data they rely on for troubleshooting, their rules of thumb, and best
practices approaches. Cross-functional workshops to share and assimilate this
information are a good approach to facilitate data gathering, analysis and sharing.
6 Continue testing use-cases, paying careful attention to the flow assumptions and what
information is being used (the field list).
7 Unify ticketing process into one system across the operation. Approaches will vary, but
typically this will involve the introduction of a new ticketing system as the preferred
approach. Evolution of an in-place system may prove complex, depending on the
degree to which it is constrained by existing coding and processes.

6. Guiding Principles
We’ve developed three guiding principles when considering
the requirements for an end-to-end ticketing solutions.
1. The customer’s time is valuable. Operators should
acknowledge and respect this fact and do their best to make
efficient use of their time. In many cases, the customer has
had to make time to contact the Operator due to something
occurring beyond their control. However, it is important to
take into consideration how this impacts before, during and
after the contact. A simple example is the ease with which
customers can find the Operator’s contact details, and whether
they need to provide additional information (such as an
account number) before the engagement starts.
For a customer, the greatest impact to their contact time is
often when their issue requires a hand-off from one contact to
another. It is vital that the internal handoffs are efficient. The
agents must take care to ensure that customer’s expectations
are managed and that they engage in effective listening to
capture the customer’s story the first time it is told.
2. The customer has a pre-conceived expectation that the
operator is reasonably in control of both the network and
service offering. For the customer, this translates into the
perception that the Operator is both aware of and able to
fix the problem. However, this requires intelligent use of
information available to the Operator, including the use of
telemetry, customer history and configuration records. It
further requires smart hand-offs between various parties and
care must be taken to ensure that the pertinent information
remains in focus at each engagement.
3. Operators need to acknowledge that customers are
ultimately human, and that they will initiate contact in a
manner and medium of their choosing. This not only
implies that there should be a variety of contact channels, but
that Operators should aim to ensure that the contact channels
offer equal capabilities in terms or issue resolution.
Furthermore, it becomes essential that a dialog initiated via a
particular channel can be seamlessly picked up and progressed
from another channel.
End-to-end ticketing supports this by ensuring that there is a
single capture point for the customer’s story that can be
managed. This increases hand-off efficiency through the
enforcing of common standards, processes and use of
information.
CHU Modeling
A CHU Model is a model for
helping design a pervasive
Information Architecture by
allowing examination of the
requirements from the
perspectives of: Channels,
Heuristics, & User-Tasks.
Channels represent the
communication paths which
need to be supported by the
Information Architecture.
User-Tasks are the micro and
macro tasks where there exist
touch-points with the
Information Architecture.
Heuristics are “rules of thumb”
for the evaluation of each
Channel/Task intersection.
[Pervasive Information
Architecture, Resmini &
Rosati]

7. The ticket is able to incorporate relevant telemetry, history and configuration in one place and
make it universally visible to all parties through the service chain. This minimizes the dependency
on and use of data silos and proprietary information. If key information is available to support
troubleshooting, this can be made available via the ticket from the start of the process. This
enables all parties to work smarter and breaks down barriers to cross-department interactions.
Soft Benefits
The introduction of end-to-end ticketing also brings with it a number of soft benefits, particularly
in the areas of staff development and staff turnover reduction. Customer Care professionals
derive job satisfaction through their ability to help customers resolve their problems. Staff
happiness can thus be improved and turnover can be reduced by allowing participants a more
holistic view of the service workflow, where each participant has visibility into their contributions
to the process.
Along with exposing value-add, this has the reciprocal benefit of reducing the tendency to throw
issues over the wall and reduce caste formation between groups. The end-to-end ticket allows
staff visibility beyond the “wall”. This allows staff to better appreciate the impact of their actions,
including for how delays and errors are propagated through the service process.
From a staff development perspective, increased availability of information makes it possible for
staff to, at various points in the workflow, actively expand their knowledge through context-based
learning. This makes it more feasible to both move resources between groups and provide more
options for staff to progress their own careers.
Conclusion
As we move from a world where isolated support silos are merged, the use of more sophisticated
IT will undoubtedly play a key role allowing Operators to improve their dialog with customers.
Speaking the same technical language and using a common script throughout the organization is
a fundamental requirement to ensuring a consistent dialog across divisions.
To ensure satisfied customers, the organization needs to continually strive to meet and exceed
customer expectations. Expectations are shaped by all kinds of outside forces, internal and
external, and the Operator needs to constantly seek to negotiate these through their interactions
with the customer, utilizing their fine-tuned skills to avoid emotional states in favor of
collaboration and resolution.
An End-to-End ticket allows Operators to manage these interactions. It ensures that they can
intelligently leverage the wealth of information available within the organization to improve
customer service. At the same time it facilitates a structured approach to learning from - and
improving - these processes moving forward. From here, we can build a solid foundation for
future innovations targeted at simplifying the customer journey and improving the customer
experience.