Defining a Trouble Report Format for the Seamless Integration of Problem Management into Customer Service Management

Customer Service Management (CSM) offers customers a “logical view” onto the service management of a service provider. CSM describes a management interface between customer and service provider and enables a customer to access service-specific management information about the subscribed service. The information flow across the CSM interface is bidirectional, from customer to service provider and vice versa. This bidirectional flow of infomation is of particular importance in multi-layer service hierarchies, as otherwise players in this service hierarchy cannot determine the QoS parameters from the layer below, but have to provide services to the layer above according to specified SLAs. The information exchanged across the CSM interface covers all functional areas of management. This paper focuses on the problem management task of Customer Service Management. This task describes the ability of a customer to actively participate in the trouble administration process of the service provider. The paper points out, why existing standards and related research work is not satisfactory to foster inter-domain problem management between customer and service provider. Hence, a methodology that results in a generic interface and a generic data structure called CSM Trouble Report (CSM-TR) is proposed. The CSM Trouble Report can be exchanged across the CSM management interface regardless of the position in a given service hierarchy and the service in question. It enables a customer to report problems, query, view, modify and cancel his trouble reports. The customer gets notified of problems that affect his agreed service level, changes in the state of current trouble reports, and upon problem resolution. The object model of the CSM-TR is described using UML notation and is instantiated for a real-life scenario.