CUSTOMER CARE AND SUPPORT
The BrixCare line of customer care and support applications extend the Brix System's powerful visibility and troubleshooting capabilities out to enterprise desktop and residential locations. These new capabilities help VoIP service providers reduce overall support costs, and bolster their bottom line by increasing their customer satisfaction and retention levels.

BrixCare applications enable providers to:

• Market and differentiate their company and services based on quality
• Employ cost-effective, self-service portals to supplement technical support channels
• Quickly resolve or efficiently escalate user-reported problems without immediately dispatching a technician
• Avoid costly cycles of technician call-backs by ensuring successful service turn-up and problem resolution on the first visit

The BrixCare family includes the following applications for VoIP services:

• Self-Service
• Interact
• Troubleshoot

BrixCare Self-Service
Most VoIP providers do not own, control, or have visibility into their customers' environments or access networks, yet problems in these locations — like misconfiguration of the home network or congestion in the access network — are often to blame when users don't receive the PSTN-like quality they anticipate.

When their quality expectations are not met, users typically complain about how bad their VoIP service is when, in reality, the problem may have nothing to do with their VoIP provider. BrixCare Self-Service helps both users and providers quickly determine whether a problem is coming from the user's environment, the ISP's network, or the VoIP provider's service delivery infrastructure.

The user-initiated BrixCare Self-Service application gives providers the visibility they need to quickly and cost-effectively isolate the cause and location of service-impacting problems, thereby allowing them to fix those under their control, and dispatch problems outside of their networks to the responsible parties.

BrixCare Interact
The only support option more expensive then dispatching a technician is dispatching a technician again and again and again. Unfortunately, technicians are routinely called back to the same job site two, three, or more times to address either the identical issue or a cascade of issues caused by the original fix. For example, the installation of broadband VoIP might cause problems with the customer's video service, while the subsequent fix causes VoIP to fail, and so on.

At service turn-up or the conclusion of a service call, BrixCare Interact enables a technician to validate VoIP service availability and performance before leaving the customer's residence or office.

With BrixCare Interact, technicians pick up their phones and call a "Golden Phone" Brix Verifier residing in the provider's network. The Golden Phone Verifier answers the call, plays a short instruction message, and then measures the quality of the conversation. Similarly, a customer service representative might instruct users reporting service quality problems to also call the Golden Phone. BrixCare Interact requires no agent at the customer premise.

BrixCare Troubleshoot
Sometimes user-reported quality problems are hard to track down as they occur only at certain times of day, when calling particular numbers, or in seemingly random patterns. Such problems can take hours, days, or even longer to identify, so deploying a technician is just not feasible.

To crack hard-to-find problems like these, providers need extended, remote troubleshooting capabilities. BrixCare Troubleshoot enables technical support personnel to gather the additional diagnostic information they need by monitoring all aspects of VoIP quality using the Brix Tri-Q Analysis, measuring customer bandwidth, and running other diagnostic tests.

To accommodate all environments, BrixCare Troubleshoot offers both downloadable remote agents as well as agent-less options.

Support personnel instruct end users to download the BrixCare Troubleshoot agent to their desktops. Support personnel then control all testing remotely by selecting one or more troubleshooting test templates and initiating them directly from the BrixCare console for on-demand or scheduled execution.

Providers also repeatedly test VoIP quality and performance by automatically initiating test calls from Brix Verifiers to standards-compliant end-user devices, such as phones, VoIP adaptors, and eMTAs — all done transparently to the end user. These devices terminate the call and loop back media to the Brix Verifier enabling it to measure the quality of that test call. Loop back testing to compliant end-user devices requires no BrixCare agent at the customer premise.