NetStar Networks is a leader in the Asian Internet Network Infrastructure market, with revenues of approximately US$100 million in 2000. NetStar is headquartered in Hong Kong and has more than 20 offices around Asia including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra. One quarter of NetStar's 750 employees are based in Australia.

NetStar's customers include banks and financial institutions, government organisations, telecommunications companies and many others. The type of Internet network services NetStar provides for its customers include the designing, planning and building of voice and data networks, security, 24 x 7 customer support, remote management (including data, voice, anti-virus and security) and network maintenance provision.

Major IT decisions always seem to come with global change

NetStar implemented FrontRange's help desk management tool HEAT in September 1999 in its 24-hour Network Operations Centre or Global Net Centre. This decision followed a global corporate ownership change that left the management team to decide whether to keep the existing help desk product or change to a completely new system.

Commenting on the decision to install HEAT, Mr. Danny Maher, Director of Support Services, NetStar Networks, remarked that a review of NetStar's needs against what was available in the market-place revealed that the best long-term option was to go with HEAT.

"It would have been easier to retain our previous product as we had the data structure in place and wouldn' t have to re-train anyone, but we decided in the end it was worth the effort migrating to HEAT. We needed a product with complete customisation capabilities and plenty of flexibility to ease integration with our existing applications" said Mr. Maher.

The decision essentially came down to what was best for the organisation in terms of functionality and the bottom line, "The really important factor was that we needed something that had a wide range of functions - we have a diverse range of needs and didn't want to purchase a separate module for each of our requirements. HEAT was an all-in-one package," added Mr. Maher.

When IT staff need IT help

NetStar's Global NetCentre is a network engineering support service providing assistance to its customers' high-level engineers and IT support staff.

"The IT staff of a financial institution may call us if they have a network failure which causes their ATMs to go offline or an Internet site to go down. The call is answered directly by one of our engineers, who then logs the fault in HEAT and along with the customer assigns a priority. HEAT's automatic call escalation processes are then activated for this 'priority one' outage," said Mr. Maher.

The team leader is notified via email immediately when a Priority one case is logged. After 15 minutes, if the problem is not resolved, the team leader is paged and the call centre manager is emailed. Branch managers and account managers are also included in the automated notification/escalation procedures so that when a customer has an outage, all relevant NetStar employees are notified at appropriate times to ensure the highest level of customer focus and satisfaction. NetStar's active automatic escalation procedures continue up the chain of command to the country manager and eventually the president of NetStar. 

NetStar uses HEAT for all support queries, not only 'priority one calls'. "We aim to provide the highest level of partnership for our customers. Customers are encouraged to call whenever they need assistance, not just when there is a serious network outage - a customer may have read about a particular technology which they would like advice on - the automated escalation procedures are activated for all calls, intelligently using different escalation methods and timelines in accordance with the type of call that was logged, the customer who logged it, the time, the geographical location, the priority, the support engineer handling the case and a range of other variables which may come in to play" said Mr. Maher.

"We can't afford time-out for change"

A crucial factor when installing HEAT was to minimise interruption and time-away-from-work for NetStar. The total implementation time was two weeks, which included one day of staff training.

"FrontRange's HEAT, is specifically designed for dynamic enterprises that don't have the luxury of massive time and monetary expenditure for their help desks, but do require a professional, sophisticated and reliable tool. Something with out-of-the-box convenience but more advanced than a simple call logging application," said Mr. Archie Wilson, Vice President Asia Pacific, FrontRange Solutions.

& but we need to change everyday

Another primary concern for NetStar was the ability to customise the product offering not only during the implementation phase, but everyday.

"Customers are constantly driving change and our people and systems need to adapt. We have customers ringing regularly and asking from now on, every time there is a fault at this particular site, I want to know about it straight away, wherever I am. I don't care what the priority is and obviously we have to be extremely responsive to this need. Manual approaches to these types of queries do not scale and are difficult to manage. HEAT gives us the ability to quickly and easily customise or add unique functionality, which enables us to rapidly respond to each customers requirements" said Mr. Maher.

I want to know what's going on, wherever, whenever

Using HEAT, NetStar can share information with internal and external customers, via desktop PC, the Internet and even mobile phones. And unlike its previous software, HEAT is able to add internal account management details. As soon as a fault is logged, the relevant account manager automatically gets an email and/or a text message on his or her mobile phone detailing the problem and the status.

Utilising HEATSelfService, customers can check the status of their network and/or faults logged themselves, rather than awaiting feedback. In addition, NetStar staff located in Asia can check the status of data, securely, anytime using iHEAT thus providing customers with an international, round-the-clock, multi-tiered support system.

"As well as sharing information with the account managers, we have implemented HEATSelfService to give our customers live access to the data. Likewise, we have implemented iHEAT to give our field engineers and the engineers in our Global NetCentre POPs in Asia full access to heat for call logging and enquiry without clogging up the bandwidth between us" said Mr. Maher.

Some companies claim they are dedicated to their customers, but we really mean it

"To maintain a superior level of customer service, our Global Net Centre has the facility to be proactive - not just reactive. Our NetManage customers have dedicated links between their network and our centre. We proactively monitor and manage their network on their behalf".

As well as increasing information visibility and a more efficient call resolution process," said Mr. Maher - HEAT has massively reduced the time we have spent on database administration in comparison to our previous system.

"All things considered," concluded Mr. Maher "the primary benefit of HEAT was that it was an out-of-the-box and a customer-focused help desk rather than an internally focused help desk. The reason we ruled out many competing products was because they didn't allow us to define our customers properly and have multiple contacts under each customer. The ability for us to add our account managers to the problem resolution process, whether they are on their computers or on their mobile phones, was also crucial."

"NetStar is a perfect example of the type of organisation HEAT is designed for. The customisation capabilities, automated call escalation process and professional interface of HEAT is ideal for growing companies with needs changing daily," said Mr. Wilson. "In addition, the out-of-the-box aspect of HEAT and low installation and training time required facilitates a rapid return-on-investment".