PRISMA as a quality tool for promoting customer satisfaction in the telecommunications industry

Abstract

Near-miss event reporting systems have a successful history in managing risk in industries such as medicine, aviation, nuclear power, and the petrochemical industry. By treating events of customer dissatisfaction as accidents, near-miss event reporting systems designed to reduce risks to safety in hazardous environments may be borrowed by the telecommunications industry. The system chosen for this study was the Prevention and Recovery Information System for Monitoring and Analysis (PRISMA), developed by the Eindhoven University of Technology (EUT). The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of applying PRISMA as a tool to reduce risks to customer dissatisfaction. Participants in the project included the EUT Safety Management Group, a consultant, and six Network Service Managers from a telecommunications company whose duties included responding to customer complaints. Twenty-three incidents were investigated with an average of 5.9 root causes arising from 2.9 process owners per event. Causal trees were generated for each incident and root causes were classified according to the Eindhoven Classification Model (ECM). The distribution of 135 root causes was 50% organizational, 32% human, 16% technical and 2% unclassifiable. The participants were successful in executing the functional steps of PRISMA in response to incidents of customer dissatisfaction. This study established the suitability of PRISMA as a tool for managing risks to customer satisfaction within the telecommunications domain.