If You Have to Report an Internet Outage at Your Site

Your DNR IT Customer Care Team wanted to bring this exceptionally important information to your attention, if you have to call the Service Desk to report an Internet outage at your site.

Important! Your site may be a Managed Broadband Site . If it is, do not call the GETS Service Desk to report an outage. Click here for a list of Managed Broadband Sites. If you site is on the list (please read the list thoroughly), then please call 1-855-882-6005 to report your outage.

 

The Need-to-Know Summary:

When you report an Internet outage at your location, and give all the information to the Service Desk agent who is handling your call, have the Service Desk agent read back to you the details of the problem that they entered it into the ticket to make sure your site Internet outage is actually recorded as a Severity Two site outage, and NOT that you simply cannot access the Internet on your computer.
 

The Details:

We have had several instances recently where a DNR Associate called the Service Desk and correctly identified a problem as being an Internet outage affecting their entire site ... only to have the Service Desk agent record the problem as an individual's problem (e.g., "end user cannot access the Internet on their computer"), NOT as a site problem.

Note that this incorrect problem description happened even though our DNR Associates clearly told the Service Desk agent that the entire site was down.

As a result, the problem was incorrectly routed to Dell as an individual computer problem, instead of being correctly routed to AT&T as a site network connectivity problem.

In one case, this resulted in a four-day delay -- Tuesday through Friday -- in getting a site's problem resolved ... all because what our colleague clearly described was mistakenly entered instead as a problem with an individual's computer.

Here is what I would like for everyone to do who has to report an Internet outage for a location:

After you provide information, before the call reaches its end, have the Service Desk agent read back to you the description of the problem exactly as they entered it into the ticket.

If you find out that the problem is not correctly recorded, have the Service Desk agent change the description immediately, to your satisfaction. Do not conclude the call until you are satisfied your problem is recorded properly.

Then send DNR IT the ticket number -- either SR (Service Request) or IN (Incident) -- and describe what happened.

For that matter, even if you have to call in a less severe problem, you might just also ask the Service Desk agent to read back the problem description, just to make sure.

I know this sounds like we are having to babysit the Service Desk, and we are. However, there have been too many recent instances of this that have cost DNR lost time and lost revenue. I want us to do what we can to make sure our problems are recorded properly and handled efficiently.

Asking to have the problem description read back to you takes only a minute. It can make several day's difference in how quickly the problem is handled.