Turbocharged Tier 2 Support strategies for Reduced Downtime
For Internet Service Providers and for big companies with huge IT infrastructure spread across continents, providing exceptional uptime and highly available network services is crucial for retaining subscribers and avoiding complains from internal users. A key component of this exceptional uptime is effective Tier 2 technical support. As ISPs deal with ever-increasing complexities in service offerings, it leads to complex network and complex troubleshooting when failure occurs. Hence it has become vital to have a high-performance Tier 2 support team than ever.
What is Tier 2 Support?
Tier 2 support or Level 2 support is the second level technical support in Internet Service Provider and Enterprise Network teams. When the non-technical customer queries are filtered out by the Tier 1 or Level 1 team, the purely technical ones are escalated to the Tier 2 team. They have advanced skills, experience and “know” the network much better, hence they also have a higher responsibility to tackle cases and tickets escalated to them.
Just to recall, the typical call/ticket flow of a customer complaint goes as below:
Contact Centre/Tier 1/Level 1 support – Billing questions, purchase and plan inquiry, only basic technical checks.
NOC/Tier 2 support – More Technical checks, more troubleshooting
NOC/Tier 3 support – Advanced technical troubleshooting, network design and engineering level support
The Critical Role of Tier 2 Support for ISPs
So here if we notice, the Tier 2 support team strikes a critical balance – it serves as the main touch point for handling difficult or escalated subscriber issues without requiring much of critical engineering resources. A solid Tier 2 team works seamlessly with Tier 1 agents to boost first-level resolution rates. They have specialized skills, network access-levels and advanced tools that enable them to remotely or locally diagnose problems, check details which Level 1 support may have missed, walk subscribers and users through fixes, and dispatch field techs whenever deemed necessary.
The importance of Tier 2 support is evidenced by the fact that 50-70% of technical issues are resolved at the Tier 2 level, preventing escalation to Tier 3 engineering teams. So for ISPs seeking to maximize customer satisfaction through quick, thorough issue resolution, the competency of their Tier 2 group is paramount.
Hence, the difference between the tier1 and tier 2 support is that the tier 1 team is fully customer facing and customer focused, whereas the tier 2 support team is technically focused as they work on technical aspects of the network, servers and IT infrastructure in general.
Tier 2 support role in Network Operations Centre (NOC)
Because the Tier 2 support team possess advanced technical knowledge and skills, they often have specialized areas of expertise and deeper understanding of the network and its components. Components which “tend” to fail, usual scenarios, pitfalls. They have understanding and experience on the “best practices” in the industry, dos and don’ts and have higher access to the network configuration level and advanced tools. Tier 2 is in integral part of the Network Operations Centre.
Duties and Responsibilities
Probably the first duty of a Tier 2 engineer is to know and understand the network and IT infrastructure in full detail. That includes the design, network maps, traffic flows, IP addressing schemas, Vlan databases, details of where the different types of customers and users are branching out. They should better understand high priority customers and their network/infra setup. Customers will expect that the ISP engineers fully comprehend their setup, which is not always fully possible, but the Tier 2 support team and the NOC overall should have a fairly good understanding
Ticket Escalations
Like we understand the Tier 1 support team deals with usual customer queries and inquiries, they filter out the technical cases and escalate to Tier 2 team. These are the escalated tickets which need attention and are mostly categorized based on their priorities. The higher priority (P1, P2) are mostly service affecting or causing loss of productivity or loss of business. Tier 2 teams get ticket escalations for both internal and external users (customers) for their own ISP network or Customer’s network. In an enterprise setting, the Tier 2 support team is crucial for maintaining high uptime and ensuring that network issues are resolved efficiently and effectively
Customer Meetings
It mostly happens that there may be ‘n’ number of tickets and cases flowing through the CRM queues and some of them to be dealt by the Tier 2 team involve having calls and meetings with the customer’s IT team directly. The customer IT manager or IT team is the network team within an Enterprise Network, dealing with an ISP engineer for an issue. These meetings may be for troubleshooting issues, testing changes done via change management requests, implementing new setup and clubbing the components of the ISP network and the Customer network together to streamline a new or interrupted traffic flow.
Bridge between teams within the NOC
Tier 2 support team often works closely with Tier 1 and Tier 3 teams in the NOC acting as a bridge between them. They are also called up in management meetings for escalated customer and network cases. During their free time, the Tier 2 team usually write up the documentation and update the network maps
Challenges in Maintaining In-House Tier 2 Teams
For years, companies have mainly relied on in-house Tier 2 support teams comprised of their own employees. However, as delivering support grows more complex, this traditional approach faces headwinds
Staffing Pain Points
Despite the rise in training and university courses, tech talent remains rare and expensive. Add to that the 9-to-5 x 40hr/week with weekly offs, calendar/festive leaves and vacations. This results in Level 2 team being always on-call to cover emergencies, despite the lack of skilled and experienced network engineers. High role churn rate annually compounds staff hiring and replacement hurdles. These issues result in many companies opening up branches world wide to cover for absence and lack of talent. Outsourcing becomes a good option in these cases to have additional cover for the in-house teams
Budget issues
An in-house support team racks up on substantial labor, training, and quality costs over time. Now with tight margins as the new norm rather than the exception, the financial viability of purely in-house Tier 2 support needs a detailed review. Hence many companies have outsourced one or more of their teams and functions to those in developing countries
Skillset issues
Just as we see talent loss many tech sectors, ISP and Telecom is no different. The skillsets and amount of hands on job experience is varied among Tier 2 tech support engineers. There are network engineers who have expertise and skills in only one particular OEM hardware and not other. Some have hands on on many OEM hardware, but not entirely in depth.
It is just like some pilots have training and experienced on Boeing and some have it on Airbus, while some have both. After all, the flying hours or the number of difficult network issues a tier 2 engineer has seen and resolved shows how good he or she will perform. Due to this rarity in talent, outsourcing adds another support level for outsourced talent which many ISPs and Enterprise companies harness from developing countries
Flexibility issues
This is perhaps the biggest advantage in outsourced talent. They are extremely flexible and adaptable working on calendar/festive offs, weekends, night shifts, overtime and odd hours of the day/night. While working in a team, they will internally manage and adjust within themselves the coverage required for tier 2 support.
The appeal of offshore outsourcing
To ease cost pressures and access specialized expertise, outsourcing Tier 2 support offshore has grown increasingly popular in the ISP space over the last decade. Top offshore outsourcing destinations like India offer game-changing workforce advantages:
Thriving talent pool of thousands of technical support and Telecom professionals
English proficiency rates up to 90% amongst support reps
Average annual attrition as low as 15% (less than half of US levels)
80%+ CSAT performance becoming the norm
Cost Savings
When calculating all expenses – salaries, benefits, management overhead, facilities, IT infrastructure – offshore Tier 2 support and NOC costs 75% cheaper than domestic one
Scalability
Unlike fixed in-house teams, offshore partners can easily scale the number of skilled agents within no time. You will get talent which has worked with international customers
Focus on Core Strengths
With Tier 2 and NOC offloaded, ISPs can better focus internal teams on higher sales, optimizing networks, enhancing customer experience and going beyond the competition
Conclusion
Across measures of cost, scalability, reach, expertise, and performance, savvy ISPs are realizing outsourcing Tier 2 support allows them to “do more with less”. It frees up resources to pursue advances in subscriber experience, speed time to market
on service launches, and boost profit margins.
As competition intensifies and complexity heightens across the ISP landscape, integrating specialized offshore talent into support operations has become an essential strategy to balance cost control with excellence in subscriber care.
Don’t let gaps in capacity, cost or capability within overloaded internal teams hamper the efforts to deliver exceptional ongoing service. Outsourcing to an elite offshore Tier 2 partner like Quadrang Systems helps savvy ISPs clear support bottlenecks. Leverage Quadrang System’s highly trained, ISP-centric and experienced agents for NOC support and focus to grow your business’ core competency while controlling costs.
