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A Directions Whitepaper

5WAYSTo Deliver Quality of Service for Your Customers - Faster and Smarter

Maximize Revenue, Improve Customer Satisfactionand Reduce SLA Violations

Growing demand is driving the delivery of new complex satellite services. Ranging from television broadcasts, enterprise

services, broadband connectivity to mobile applications, these services offer the potential for higher revenues and market

expansion. With these new services comes added complexity and increased risks for customer impacting issues. So how

do you effectively reduce Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations, minimize customer churn, maximize revenue and

improve customer satisfaction?

Here are five ways you can deliver Quality of Service (QoS) for your customers - faster and smarter.

Prioritize broadband service issues based on the greatest impact on the bottomline

So, what happens when your broadband satellite services are disrupted by multiple issues, such as rain fade and an equipment failure at the same time? Which service do you fix first?

Many of the leading providers of satellite services worldwide are turning to Service Quality Management (SQM) applications to help them prioritize their customer services. So what can an SQM solution tell you? Picture multiple services having an outage at the same time, such as your high speed Internet service for an oil rig, the video conferencing service for an office and a long distance learning application for a university.

By reviewing the SLA Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each service using an SQM solution that provides deep service visibility, you can quickly prioritize the remediation of the services. You can view the time left in the SLA before a violation occurs and the cost of a customer outage credit for each service. In an instant you can determine that the high speed service is not close to violating its SLA, but that the video conferencing and long distance applications are both close to being out of compliance.

When you examine the cost of the customer outage credits, it’s clear that the video conferencing service has the most significant penalty associated with a violation, so it becomes the highest priority issue with the long distance learning application and the high speed Internet service being second and third in line to be resolved.

By prioritizing service issues based on revenue impact you can minimize the effects on the bottom line. The services with the highest revenue impact are fixed in priority order or if a service has just violated its SLA and a credit is already going to be paid, then the next highest revenue customer service can move to the top of the priority list, since it has the most impact to the bottom line now.

1

VideoTeleconference

High-SpeedInternet

Long DistanceLearning App

Services SLA Compliance Status

$ $$ $$$

Potential CostValue of Outage Credits Prioritization

$ $$Out of Compliance

Out of Compliance

Out of Compliance

$$$

$ $$ $$$

1

2

3

Prioritization Process

Prioritizing the video conferencing service based on revenue impact.

Three services are down with critical alarms

Video conferencing and long distance app service are close to being out of compliance

Video conferencingservice has the largestpenalty followed by the long distance appand high speed internet service

There has been 50% revenue growth over

the last 5 years in broadband services.

Satellite Industry Association (SIA)

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Predict enterprise service problems ahead of customer impactYour enterprise customers pay more and expect higher levels of service. The SLAs reflect that reality. Enterprise services offer you higher margins, but they bring with them more risk, since penalties for outages are larger. So how do you avoid service issues impacting your customers and the potential of steep SLA penalties?

Predictive analytics can help you detect issues that affect your enterprise services prior to revenue and customer impact. A robust SQM solution offers not only historical, but also predictive metrics to raise operational productivity.

For example, you can monitor the signal quality of a data transmission service that supports a SCADA application using KPIs such as EIRP, Es/NO and C/NO using a solution such as NeuralStar SQM. If the metrics drop below a minimum threshold, it could point to an upcoming interference issue that may soon affect this enterprise service. This gives you a chance to proactively try to resolve the interference issue prior to an SLA being violated.

By setting dynamic thresholds for the data transmission service you can keep revenue streams flowing and SLAs intact by effectively predicting service issues prior to them occurring. The dynamic thresholds can be set above and below baseline values so that you receive alerts if satellite traffic levels spike or drop dramatically. This enables performance and latency issues to be rapidly detected and adjustments made to maintain throughput, minimize congestion and ensure a high level of QoS to avoid any customer impact and SLA penalties.

Predictive analytics can also be used to detect other common issues that can affect enterprise services such as increasing power levels of HPAs indicating a possible rain fade event, beam voltage fluctuations highlighting an impending transmitter problem, rising temperatures on LNAs signaling near-term equipment failure or disk space and memory utilization on servers reaching capacity pointing to a performance issue.

Detecting an upcoming interference issue based on changes in signal quality.

Alarms indicate signal quality has fallen below minimum threshold levels for the enterprise service

Dropping signalquality levelsfor enterpriseservice indicatesan upcominginterferenceissue

Predictive metrics are especially useful

for companies that are seeking to

mitigate risks and prevent disruptive

events having an impact on productivity.

Gartner estimates that by 2017,

organizations with predictive analytics in

place will be 20 percent more profitable

than those without.

Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory

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You now know that there has been no impact to the mobile broadband service because there has been no downtime due to the automatic failover, but you need to replace the back-up BDC to reduce any future risks. This added intelligence enables you to quickly determine the real issue, avoid wasting time reviewing non-critical alarms and minimize any service disruptions to deliver a good quality of experience and minimize customer churn.

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Implement intelligent service rules to reduce MTTR for mobile satellite services

Is a growing source of your revenue based on the insatiable mobile bandwidth demand from users in the maritime, land and aeronautical sectors? If so, keeping these customers satisfied and the churn rates low is core to maintaining your growing revenue stream. Then, how do you minimize service disruptions, so latency sensitive mobile applications deliver a good quality of experience to keep customers satisfied?

You create intelligent service rules based on your mobile satellite concept of operations to reduce any downtime and accelerate the troubleshooting and remediation process. The service logic behind the rules identifies the real alarms, suppresses the false ones and determines the root cause of issues faster to reduce the Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR) and minimize any service disruptions to mobile customers.

For example, when a Block Down Converter (BDC) that supports the delivery of broadband mobile connectivity to a cargo ship fails, it triggers a flood of downstream alarms showing multiple issues that can overwhelm you. You don’t know which alarms are real and which ones are false positives or the affect they have on your customer’s services.

You don’t have time during an outage to review each alarm individually – the service needs to be back online immediately to avoid frustrated customers. You only want to view the critical alarms that require action, instead of filtering through a sea of alarms.

You need intelligent service rules that automatically suppress downstream alarms for the other devices in the equipment chain when a BDC fails. Rules that add intelligence to your operation by monitoring the service status and service quality indicators and send out only a single major alarm that lets you know that the service is “Available”, because the BDC automatically failed over to a back-up device, but “At Risk” because there is no longer any redundancy with the spare BDC in use.

Enhancing mobile satellite service performance by providing actionable intelligence.

Mobile service is runningon back-up BDC

BDC failure triggersmajor alarm

Single alarm with others suppressed

Serviceavailability

over timefor mobile

service

Servicestatus is

“Available”

The service

quality is“At Risk”

Mobile satellite services grew by 25% in 2014.

Satellite Industry Association (SIA)

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Minimize disruptions to high value customer servicesDo you know what customer services are being passed through your devices and the criticality of the equipment in terms of its SLA implications? This insight is vital during troubleshooting and the maintenance process.

As an example, a common challenge when conducting maintenance is the lack of real-time visibility into the relationships among devices, customer services and SLAs. Trying to track the relationships manually through spreadsheets and diagrams is time consuming, labor intensive and prone to human error. So how do you effectively perform routine and preventive maintenance, while delivering the QoS your customers expect?

With the right SQM solution, you can view in real-time your entire inventory of equipment that supports customer services. You can immediately see what services are running through a rack of equipment and what customers would be affected by maintenance and determine any SLA implications.

Consider a scenario where you need to take a specific downconverter offline for its preventive maintenance. You find primary downconverter number five in the inventory list and you can see that it’s a high value device because it supports five important customers with services ranging from full-time video, high speed Internet access to video conferencing.

By looking at the SLA metrics it’s clear that the device is supporting three services that are out of compliance. You quickly determine that it’s best to wait until the SLA issues have been worked out before taking the downconverter offline for maintenanace. This will help minimize the service impact to your high value customers. With this type of visibility across

your inventory you are better able to plan your maintenance efforts and troubleshoot effectively to ensure the optimal delivery of services to your customers. You can also quickly see which devices support multiple services and ensure that spares are available, since any downtime could cause SLA violations and costly outage credits.

Improving customer service delivery by optimizing maintenance efforts.

Downconverter availability and status

Several customersrelying on downconverter

Multiple servicesrunning on the device No alarms associated

with the equipment

Three servicesout ofcompliance

4

5

Reduce costly SLA violations in highest profit satellite video services

If you’re like most satellite operators, television broadcasts are a big source of revenue. So how do you effectively ensure the uptime of these top revenue producing television services to avoid costly SLA violations and enhance the customer experience?

Let’s start by looking at the top ten SLAs for these video services by revenue in real-time. With a solution such as NeuarlStar SQM, at a quick glance you can see if any of your top revenue sources are affected by a service issue.

For example, when your most profitable full time video service is displaying a red alarm, you can determine the immediate customer impact by looking at (KPIs) including how many seconds the SLA has been out of compliance, what the dollar value is of any outage credits and how the expected performance of the SLA is compared to the actual. The longer the outage, the greater the likelihood that the customer experience will be negatively impacted.

You can also determine the longer term impact of the television service issue by reviewing the total dollar value in the cycle and how much time is left in the cycle. As the duration of an outage increases, so do the outage credits as a percentage. You can get a real-time view into the total dollar value of the outage credits that may need to be paid back to the customer, if the television service issue isn’t resolved within a certain time frame. It tells you the overall impact this television service issue could have to your operations and to your customer satisfaction levels.

To jump start the process of minimizing the full time video service issue - examine the end-to-end services map that shows which segment of the satellite operation is affected by the issue, whether it’s a carrier, downlink or uplink problem. Then you can quickly drill down into the affected service segment and start the troubleshooting process to resolve the issue.

Minimizing customer impact by monitoring the top SLAs for video services.

Performance of SLA for video service

Top ten SLAs

by revenueshowing an

issue withvideo

service

End-to-endservice view

showingalarm

KPIs for affectedSLA- Outage credits- Value per cycle- Time out of compliance- Total time in cycle

Satellite TV Services (DBS/DTH) account for 77% of all satellite service revenues.

Satellite Industry Association (SIA)

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Managing Complex Services - The Path ForwardManaging customer services and doing so effectively is becoming a necessity and no longer a luxury in today’s hyper competitive environment. A recent report from the World Teleport Association surveying global operators, teleport operators and telecom businesses describes the driving forces well.

“All this points to a future where the ability to manage complex network services – and do it effectively, efficiently and with superb customer service will become a major competitive differentiator. If our respondents are correct, it may well become something more: a matter of survival for service providers both big and small, in every market.”

Does your organization have an SQM solution in place to compete effectively? One that helps you take a business focused approach to managing services and SLAs, rather than just managing the underlying network and devices. A solution that will help you to keep pace with demand, better manage customer services, and drive greater profitability.

Choosing the right solution could be the critical milestone that helps your organization not only survive, but thrive in this customer centric environment.

NeuralStar SQM: Maximizing Revenue, Improving Customer Satisfactionand Reducing SLA ViolationsNeuralStar® Service Quality Manager (SQM) is the first end-to-end enterprise software product for satellite and terrestrial service management. It helps service providers improve quality of service and customer satisfaction, maintain and grow revenue and optimize satellite and terrestrial operations.

Improve Quality of Service and Customer Satisfaction — NeuralStar SQM improves the quality of services and more effectively manages SLAs, resulting in enhanced customer care and increased customer satisfaction. It minimizes service disruptions to customers by discovering issues faster and helping operational staff resolve them rapidly.

Maintain and Grow Revenue — NeuralStar SQM identifies high-priority problems quickly and helps operational staff respond based on business impact such as revenue, profitability, service and customer experience. It enables organizations to manage more services, launch new services and maximize SLAs to maintain and increase revenue.

Optimize Operations — NeuralStar SQM monitors service performance across satellite and terrestrial operations in a single unified platform delivering end-to-end management visibility. It proactively monitors the network to identify issues before they become service impacting and scales to manage hundreds of services and thousands of supporting devices.

Customer SuccessThe world’s leading provider of satellite

services uses NeuralStar SQM to manage

its business critical customer services

effectively. Using the single platform,

they are able to monitor and control their

entire teleport operations and manage

all of their services for customers.

Customers experience a higher level of

service, operational productivity is raised,

costs are lowered and problems are pro-

actively prevented.

NueralStar SQM’s global and customer service centric view.

5971 Kingstowne Village ParkwaySuite 200Alexandria, VA 22315703-254-2000Email: Info@KratosNetworks.comwww.KratosNetworks.com

From Kratos, the Leader in End-to-End (E2E) Management

Kratos is a leader in helping organizations assure the availability, reliability and quality of communications across large scale, heterogeneous, and geographically distributed operations. With a complete End-to-End (E2E) management suite of products, we provide unprecedented visibility into your entire operational environment. Our products include: NeuralStar Service Quality Manager (SQM) for service and SLA management, NeuralStar for the management of large scale enterprise networks and Compass, the industry leading Monitor & Control (M&C) solution with over 3,000 global installations. Our RF interference mitigation and cancellation and other ground station solutions can also be seamlessly integrated for complete satcom management.