Technical support and field dispatch reduction for a Canadian telecommunications operator

The client is a Canadian telecommunications operator with approximately 2.8 million mobile and fixed-line subscribers, offering mobile, fixed broadband and IPTV. Field operations are the operator's largest controllable cost after network capital expenditure.

The operator was dispatching field technicians for problems that did not require them. Analysis of completed work orders found that roughly 44% of residential broadband dispatches closed with no fault found, meaning the issue was resolvable remotely and the truck roll avoidable.

The root cause was diagnostic capability in the contact centre. Tier 1 agents followed a restart-and-reconnect script and escalated everything else, and escalation in practice meant dispatch because there was no real tier 2.

The customer consequence was worse than the cost. A dispatch meant an appointment window, often days out, during which service stayed degraded, and dispatch-affected subscribers churned at roughly twice the base rate.

The operator had tried to build tier 2 internally in Canada and failed on recruitment and cost, because the technical profile competed with its own network engineering hiring in an expensive labour market.

Corpshore Mexico proposed Monterrey, whose strong engineering and technical labour market supplies a troubleshooting-capable profile that does not compete with the operator's Canadian network recruitment, at a cost the Canadian market could not match. The full time-zone overlap and cultural proximity meant real-time collaboration with the operator's Canadian network operations centre.

Corpshore proposed contracting against dispatch avoidance rather than handle time, aligning the commercial structure to the outcome the operator needed. Competing bids proposed AHT-based pricing, which the operator's analysis showed would incentivise faster escalation to dispatch.

Ninety-six agents in Monterrey across two tiers: 62 in tier 1 and 34 in a newly created tier 2 diagnostic function, with eight team leaders and three QA analysts. Tier 2 agents complete a six-week technical onboarding on the operator's access network, CPE estate, provisioning systems and line diagnostics before taking live contacts. Coverage aligns to the operator's Canadian hours across its time zones, with read access to line diagnostics and provisioning.

Build the missing tier. The core intervention was a genuine tier 2 diagnostic layer between tier 1 and dispatch. Roughly a quarter of contacts that would previously have gone to dispatch now resolve at tier 2.

Diagnostics access as a precondition. Read access to line diagnostics and provisioning was made a contractual precondition, without which tier 2 would have been a second script.

Dispatch as a decision, not a default. Every dispatch now requires a documented diagnostic conclusion, coded and reviewed weekly against work-order closure data.

Feedback into training. No-fault-found dispatches are reviewed and, where a pattern emerges, the diagnostic path is added to tier 2 training.

Field dispatches avoided reached approximately 2,740 per month by month eight and sustained there. The share of technical contacts resolved without dispatch rose from 72% to 92%.

Churn among subscribers with a technical contact fell materially, with resolved-on-call subscribers churning near the base rate against roughly double at baseline.

The operator redirected released field capacity to installation and upgrade work that had been backlogged rather than reducing field headcount.