Customer Problem Management Business Agreement R14.5.1

This business agreement document provides requirements and use cases for customer problem management, i.e. the management of problems that either cause one or more services/products to function at a level below what was committed to the customer or impact the experience of the customer.

One of the key aspects of measuring and thereby improving Customer Experience is directly related to how effectively and efficiently the Customer Requests are handled by the Service Provider from a Customer Perspective. This also directly reflects on the Quality of Service and SLA provided to the customers. Customer Problem Management and Customer SLA Management are the key applications (with reference to Application Frameworx) that are employed to manage this aspect of customer experience.

There has been significant work done in the TIP group in TM Forum to define interface specifications that address Service and Resource Management functions. The integration and control of customer problems is very important for business automation. It is important that Customer Problem Handling exposes relevant information over well-defined interfaces to other applications (say fulfilment, billing, operation readiness etc.) so that the overall customer experience management strategy of the operator can be realized.

This business agreement is the first step in the attempt to standardize the customer problem management interface so that operators can use it as reference and thereby both reduce the integration costs and also automate their end to end problem handling process across customer, service and resource domains.