Schedule F Overview (Quality of Service requirements)

Trinidad and Tobago celebrated carnival 2016 on the 8 & 9th of February. Ronnie and Caro won band of the year with their presentation Tears Of.....  So by now, you are asking yourself what does a Mas band have to do with Telecommunications. Well, strangely enough, Band leader Ronnie McIntosh highlighted in a TV6 interview that customer service was key to the band's success.

Mas bands like Telcos have to satisfy a diverse consumer population, the key is how do you satisfy increasing customer demands whilst managing cost. As a starting point providers must meet their regulatory obligations. You will recall I mentioned Schedule F in a previous post. Schedule F can be broken down into eight areas and I will highlight a few KPIs to give the readers a feel for what is measured by the TATT (Local Telecoms Regulator) given that concessionaires normally have to provide the regulator with quarterly updates on performance.

General 

1. Service Activation Time - Fixed Telecoms/ Subscription broadcast ≤ 10 working days. Mobile Telecoms ≤ 2 working days. 
2. Service Re-activation Time - ≤ 24 hours or the next working day.  
3. Consumer Query Response Time -  85% of occurrences  within the following timeframe:

• ≤ 40 seconds Customer Service 
• email contact: ≤ 24 hours or the next working day 
• Customer Service Center: ≤ 1 hour

Public Telecommunications Access Services 

1. Public Payphone Availability - ≥ 85%

Public Data (Internet) Telecommunication Services

1. Average Bandwidth to Consumer - Dial-up access: ≥ 28.8 kbps Broadband access: ≥ 128 kbps or ≥50% of advertised throughput.

Subscription Broadcasting Services

Wholesale and Interconnection services

Network Services

1. Call Drop Rate - Fixed access: ≤ 1.5 % Mobile access: ≤ 4 %
2. Call Failure Ratio - Fixed Access: 0.5% Mobile access: 3.5%

Speech Quality 

Internet Access Services

1. Internet Access Local Network Availability - ≥ 95% 

Achieving QOS requirements are not going to satisfy the demanding telecommuting customer in this day and age and actually, you may find yourself with little or no customers if your aim as an organization is to just meet your concession requirements. So set aggressive targets to ensure that the organization focuses on exceeding customer expectations as what separates you from the competition is ultimately going to be the level of service offered to your customers.

TATT is also proposing to implement the Consumer Rights and Obligations Policy  (Additional/revised QOS requirements) which may be a tall order for certain companies. A quick review of one of the KPIs (Repair times) in the current draft is shown in the table below.

18 months from the implementation of this policy the expectation is that all providers must be able to complete 75% of repairs within 24 hours for fixed-line telecommunications. Now whilst this is great for the consumer lets take any day in the week. In most T&T households mom & dad are working and not at home until after 6pm  so this translates into a next day or weekend technician visit (KPI already shot). Whilst there are solutions to address these shortcomings in the proposed policy I will leave that for another time.

So is your provider meeting their QOS obligations as defined in Schedule F?