Time is a luxury—and for many ISP support teams, it’s not one they have much of. Every second counts toward a team’s overall operational efficiency, and spending too long on one task can end up costing the company.
Thanks to LAN visibility issues, WiFi support calls in particular are difficult for teams to resolve—and often end up costing teams more than they need to.
Today, let’s explore five of the biggest time-sinks that ISP support agents face when it comes to WiFi support calls.
1. Finding the root cause of the issue
Diagnosing and resolving a WiFi connectivity issue for a subscriber takes on average 26 minutes. By contrast, the target call time for most ISP support teams is typically in the range of four to 11 minutes.
What makes it worse is that agents may not be spending those 26 minutes on the right issue. Because it’s difficult for agents to see into the subscriber’s LAN, it’s not always clear that they’ve found the true root cause of the issue. Sometimes, one issue might seem like the main problem, but it’s just the result of a deeper issue that the agent can’t see.
2. Figuring out how to resolve the issue
Once an agent has found the true root cause of a WiFi connectivity issue, they now need to A) know and follow all the steps to resolving that particular issue for that particular router with that network setup, and B) guide the subscriber through those steps.
When you consider everything involved in resolving these issues, suddenly it seems more plausible that WiFi support calls take almost three times as long as other calls.
3. Switching between tools
Did you know? On average, ISP support agents need to use five to eight different tools to resolve internet performance issues. This takes up about 15% of agents’ time, as they flip between these tools to find essential information to help subscribers.
4. Educating subscribers
Theoretically, if you can teach a subscriber why an issue happened, you can prevent it from happening again—which saves the support team’s time spent on repeat calls.
But it’s not a simple task for agents to translate technical information into a lesson that matches that particular subscriber’s level of tech-savvy, and this education often takes multiple approaches to make it stick—if it does indeed stick.
5. Handling repeat calls
If all else fails, subscribers will end up calling back in with the same issue—which means both wasted time on previous steps, and another half-hour spent trying to find and resolve the issue again.