India Major Service Center supports Orange Business enterprise customers around the globe 24/7.To find out more we spoke to Sandeep Murgai, head of the organization.
One hour’s drive away from India’s capital New Delhi lies the rapidly-growing city of Gurgaon, home to the headquarters of many Fortune 500 companies, such as Coca Cola, IBM and Microsoft. In 2005, Orange Business also chose Gurgaon to build its Major Service Center (MSC), which supports enterprise customers worldwide.
The India MSC forms part of a global network of service centers along with Egypt, France, Brazil and Mauritius. Orange has also recently set up a second center in Mumbai, the financial capital of India.
Orange employs over 1700 customer support professionals, engineers and product specialists in the India MSC. They manage over 1500 customers globally and across the Asia-Pacific region 24/7. The MSC mainly supports customers in English along with five other languages for specific needs: French, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese.
dynamic team
Certified as a top employer in India by the Top Employer Institute and rated among 100 best places to work for by Great Places to work survey in 2014, the MSC attracts a young, dynamic team. “The average age of our staff is 31 and 60% of our employees have been with us for over five years,” says Sandeep Murgai, head of the India MSC, Orange Business.
“One of the reasons for our success is that we offer 160 different job roles allowing plenty of scope for development within the company. We invest in upgrading the skills and competencies of our staff for future growth areas that help them to progress their career ,” he adds. The team has nearly 3000 individual certifications, including ITIL, PMI, Six Sigma, ISO along with vendor accreditations such as Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, Riverbed, Security, Cloud and VMWare.
design and build
The MSC works right across the customer lifecycle, including design, build and global deployment of services for customers. A delivery manager at the MSC will coordinate with local teams and technology suppliers to manage the installation of equipment for the customer. They are also responsible for configuring the network and managing change and releases.
Once the system is up and running, the delivery manager will hand over to the operations team and the service desk, which will manage the support for the customer over the length of the contract.
The MSC has large team of over 200 IT Engineers and experts to manage customer IT, cloud computing and security infrastructure support and Orange Business internal tools and application development.
In addition to being the home of the MSC, the global network operations center (NOC) is also based in Gurgaon. It employs 180 engineers who manage the global backbone of Orange Business 24 hours a day, managing 1000 points of presence (POP) in 220 countries and territories.
incident management
The Major Service Center plays a central role in ensuring that customer networks are running problem free. For example, the MSC may detect a problem with network connectivity to an enterprise site. This alerts the service desk which will raise a ticket and troubleshoot the problem. The priority will depend on the severity of the incident.
If the problem can’t be resolved immediately, it will be escalated to level-2 support which will liaise with the local carrier to isolate the issue. The service team will dispatch onsite engineers if required, order any spares required, and provide the information they need to solve the problem. In the whole process the customer is kept up to date with progress.
If the problem is serious enough, such as one that affects multiple sites, the MSC will open a crisis bridge, which the customer can attend. If a major link has gone down then it will also involve the NOC.
Although each of the MSCs is based in a different geography, they all use the same tools and processes, and can operate seamlessly worldwide. For example, a ticket raised in Rio can be fulfilled in India if required. The India MSC will deal primarily with Asia-Pacific and North American customers during the build phase, but will handle global customers during the run phase. This means that any MSC can manage any incident in any country 24/7.
The India MSC supports close to 250 major multinational companies via dedicated service desks, which proactively monitor and manage the complex customer network and services support globally.
business continuity
This global approach helps support the MSC business continuity strategy, because any center can take over the work of another if it is having an issue. An example of this business continuity in action is when the Cairo MSC was affected by political disturbance in Egypt in early 2011. When a curfew was called in late January, operations at the Egypt MSC became impossible to maintain. This put the business continuity plan into action and the center’s workload was handed over to India.
“This happened very quickly and worked very well because we had rehearsed our plan extensively,” explained Murgai, “We use the same tools and process as in Egypt so the changeover was completely seamless. As commented by many customers they didn’t even notice that there had been a change – the only difference they detected was a slight change in accents.”
The business continuity planning extends to the Major Service Center itself, which has a fully redundant network and power infrastructure, including two different entrances and its own power generation capability for back-up.
competency center
Beyond operational concerns, each of the global network of MSCs is a competency center for Orange Business. Building technology proficiency is a key part of the MSC strategy, which was started in the move towards IP transformation. The MSCs are now expanding their competency to support the Orange strategy of being the trusted partner for customers’ digital transformation.
The India MSC has particular expertise in all areas of the Orange digital transformation, including cloud computing, unified communications and security. The competency center provides additional expertise for customers in support and solution design skills – along with a testing lab for IT, data and voice platforms.
This constant search for improvement lies at the heart of the MSC’s philosophy. More than just a customer support organization, the MSC offers an integrated approach encompassing operational excellence, technology expertise and an entrepreneurial mindset to improve the end-to-end customer experience.
Find out more about our professional services, including Customized Infrastructure Care, and our presence in the Asia-Pacific.