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Scenario for Using Service Requests and Trouble Tickets in Siebel Communications

This topic gives one example of how service requests and trouble tickets might be used. You might use service requests and trouble tickets differently, depending on your business model.

A customer service representative (CSR) receives a call from the owner of a software company. He is phoning from his mobile phone and explains that he has no dial tone on his office phone. The CSR verifies the customer's service configuration and identifies the specific phone line to which he is referring.

The CSR creates a trouble ticket and attempts to use the problem resolution capabilities in Siebel Communications to resolve the customer's problem. The CSR is unable to solve the problem and passes the trouble ticket to the Network Services Group. The CSR ends the call and creates a follow-up activity on the trouble ticket.

Two minutes later, the CSR receives a broadcast message indicating that there is a circuit break that is affecting customers in a particular exchange. The CSR looks up the network-reported problem for the circuit outage and finds the specific trouble ticket. The trouble ticket details indicate that a construction crew sliced through a cable that carries network traffic for the exchange. The estimated repair time is five hours.

The CSR performs a search in Siebel Communications to find all open trouble tickets that have a service item equivalent to the affected exchange. The search produces a list of 15 trouble tickets, including the network-reported trouble ticket.

The CSR associates each of the 14 customer-reported trouble tickets with the one network-reported trouble ticket for the following reasons:

• The 14 customer-reported problems are related to one network outage.
• Your company's Siebel administrator has configured the Siebel applications so that all the customer-reported troubles are resolved when the network-reported trouble is resolved.

The CSR assigns the network trouble ticket for the cable break to a technician in the Repair and Maintenance department and receives a message from the on-site maintenance crew that the cable has been repaired and tested and is fully operational. The technician creates a series of notes in the network trouble ticket, indicating the resolution, and closes the trouble ticket.

When the technician closes the parent trouble ticket, the child trouble tickets are not automatically closed since it may be necessary to verify that each customer's problem has been fixed. Because your administrator has configured it to do so, Siebel Communications determines that the trouble ticket for the customer previously described can be closed. It then sends a text message to the customer's mobile phone notifying him of the resolution.

At the end of the day, the manager examines all of the trouble tickets generated that day.

Figure 16 shows the sequence of procedures that end users might follow to manage trouble tickets.

Figure 16. Example of Sequence for Trouble Tickets