Brandon Whilden Senior Director, Customer Operations Managed Offering Brandon Whilden Senior Director, Customer Operations

A Little About Brandon 22 Years in Telecom - Mostly in the Rochester area Background in Engineering, Operations, and Executive Management Currently focused on governance, operational excellence, and sales enablement Authored much of the Managed Offering, including how to prospect, quote, close, fulfill, maintain, and renew

Nicknamed “The Librarian” I write a lot 

Quick Definition – Core Product Examples of Core Products on our ILEC/CLEC business units are Voice, Data, Internet, Transport, Hosted Services, etc…

Quick Definition – Core Product Examples of Core Products on our VAR business unit are Collaboration, Wireless, Security, Route/Switch, Data Center, Video etc..

Quick Definition – Managed Product An MP is defined as – A contract between FLTG & our Client for Network Operations Center Monitoring and Diagnosing “Activate our NOC”

Quick Definition – Managed Service An MSA is defined as – A contract between FLTG & our Client for Professional Engineering Services Activate our Engineering

Quick Definition – NOC as a Service NOC as a service is a contract between FLTG and our Client to tap into a best in class Network Operations Center and Customer Service team, on a subscription basis

Value - MP We are monitoring when you are sleeping We are diagnosing issues before they become a calamity We extend the life and usefulness of Network devices by constantly checking vitals and acting on alerts and threshold violations We are looking at environmental metrics like temperature, humidity, and contact closures We are looking at light levels to predict outages

Value - MSA It’s difficult, and perhaps impossible for our customers to put together a staff that can cover every technology stack, including emerging technologies (like SD-WAN) Audit compliance such as PCI, SOC 2, ISO 9001 & 27001, NIST - stretch the capabilities of IT staff Focus client staff on business relevant applications that run your business– An MSA augments talent and frees up talent!

Value - NOC as a Service We already evolved from Dispatch to NOC and we learned from that experience We have perfected the extremely important “On-Boarding” process We do that… We have a complex product portfolio, we can handle many situations Within our industry, there is a lot of knowledge overlap (a MODEM is a MODEM, an ONT is an ONT, element management is element management, monitoring is monitoring, etc…) Customer Service can do lead generation, demand management, selling, fulfillment, billing, renewals, and other common duties as part of the NOC as a Service program

A Progressive NOC Strike a great balance between process and critical thinking (we don’t have robots working off of scripts). Improves job satisfaction Keep as much work contained in the NOC as possible (lower labor cost) Invest heavily in an advanced monitoring solution. “Red light / Green light” is not good enough Manage to key performance indicators with very high standards Field rotations are important to well rounded NOC technicians. Not just ride along (those are good too), actual assigned implementation work as a helper or a lead

NOC Performance Average speed of answer under 17 seconds Agent Availability & Talk Time greater than 80% 90% of trouble tickets closed within our NOC directly Truck Rolls under 10% (fix it remotely) 4.6 out of 5 customer satisfaction rating on all trouble tickets and all projects on our Fiber Network Technical Certification tracks for all Engineering staff 60% of Cisco repair done within the NOC Detailed tracking of outages identifying root cause and patterns Training. 10-12 formal training sessions per team member per year

Managed Offering Versatility All disciplines covered within multiple Technical & Engineering work groups! Both in Certification & Experience we have people who can work on every technology stack Not just one vendor: Cisco (primarily), Metaswitch, Adtran, Calix, Dell, Paulo Alto, F5, Fat Pipe, SonicWALL. Certified where possible and where it makes sense

Service Level Supervisors Manages a strict process, not people Manages our contractual obligations to our customers Advocates for customers to drive completion of open projects and tickets On-Boards new customers Attends Weekly and Monthly Business Reviews with MSA customers Provides monthly analytics Runs important Ops meetings