Imagine it’s the last quarter of the Super Bowl and suddenly there’s a service outage. Next thing you know, your call center is getting flooded with calls left and right. Is it a solitary incident? Is it affecting an entire head end? Has a truck already been dispatched?

A single head end problem can tumble into a huge backlog of unnecessary truck rolls and unhappy subscribers if customer service representatives (CSR) can’t immediately pin point the problem. While facilities-based providers have different types of monitoring equipment within their Network Operations Center (NOC) that help keep an eye on the health of the network, who’s watching the call center?Anytime service goes down over the network, like in the aforementioned example above, it’s guaranteed that inquiring subscribers will flood the call center. However, if nobody in the NOC realizes service is down, companies are missing an important opportunity to capture critical data about what’s going on in the field.

This is where Great Lake Data Systems’ (GLDS) WinWatch comes into play. WinWatch is a proactive outage detection and service monitoring solution, or NOC diagnostics tool, for the call center that looks at all of the work orders being created within the billing system and organizes them into work types within a specific work area during a specific time frame. For example, if there are 10 service outages in work area 2 within 5 minutes of each other than chances are there is an outage, even though your NOC may not be aware yet.

With WinWatch, communication between the NOC and CSRs is improved. Moreover, operators can get ahead of outages and service issues to minimize their impact on customer service.