Onecom opens customers’ eyes to network performance with Highlight

Based in Hampshire, Onecom has a UK-wide network of regional offices with over 400 staff, serving more than 10,000 customers across the UK and internationally. With Highlight, Onecom can give its customers real-time insight and greater confidence in their broadband, ethernet and hosted telephony services.

Marcus Alves, Head of Service Operations at Onecom alongside his team provide a single point of contact for all Onecom’s solutions and mobile products, ensuring project delivery and support is streamlined for the best customer experience. 

Marcus says, “Our previous monitoring tool was complicated and difficult to configure. It took too long to get customers up and running and to produce reports. I just didn’t have the time needed to maintain it.”

He continues, “I’ve known about Highlight for many years through our various partners and the timing was right for a change. What attracted me most to Highlight was the ease of use, its feature set and the reporting suite. Not least, the platform is made to be resold and given to our customers with their own secure access. Highlight constantly maintains and updates the service, so we don’t have to – a light touch for us was just what we needed. I was also pleased to talk to the Highlight development team and be shown their plans for constant development, which was a further tick in the box.”

Onecom will make Highlight available to its customers to cover basic broadband and ethernet network monitoring and reporting, with an advanced ethernet plus service for application level visibility. In addition to enhancing the support it delivers to customers, Onecom views Highlight as a valuable sales tool to differentiate its business through the high level of support it can deliver to its customers.

“We have many customers who are keen to have visibility of their estates,” adds Marcus. “Currently, if they struggle for bandwidth, they have no way of knowing if they are maxing it out or if a specific application is causing an issue. They are working in the dark. Now Highlight will open their eyes and allow for full diagnostic capabilities. It’s very powerful to have access to a tool like Highlight.”

Onecom places a great deal of value in offering self-service, so Highlight’s Help & Support Centre was a real bonus. “It guides our partners on how to support themselves,” explains Marcus. “My support team thought this was fantastic and the perfect addition to our services.”

According to Marcus, “Highlight has been a great partner to on-board. They are supportive and delivered excellent face to face training sessions to make sure our team had a strong understanding of the service. They’ve helped to scope out how best to launch and guided us in setting up our billing requirements, ensuring Highlight integrates with our systems. Most importantly, they really understood our requirements and helped us get to where we want to be.”

Looking to the future, Marcus adds, “We’re very excited about Highlight’s new “SLA Now” service, particularly from a partner perspective.

“As a Tier 3 provider, we rely on Tier 1s and 2s to deliver our services. Some partners provide SLA guarantees, but they rarely provide the capability to measure them.  For example, one of our Ethernet partners provides some monitoring, but we have to go to their application and export the reports.  For the others, we have to request reports.  The main challenge is that the providers are not quick enough to inform us if anything has gone down. It’s then embarrassing to receive a call from the customer first before we know there is an issue. 

“Highlight’s new SLA Now feature means we can see where our upstream partners are failing their SLAs in real time, and we can escalate the issue to ensure the services meet our customers’ needs.  SLA Now will ensure we can be really proactive on fault control.”