Best practice guide - Booking an engineer visit

1. Best practice guide- Booking an engineer visit 6 August 2014 Version 2.5

2. Introduction This best practice guide provides the key information that Openreach requires to help ensure a successful engineering visit. When followed, this guide will help to reduce the likelihood of customer no access or readiness issues and assist our engineers to deliver the service that you have requested. The guide covers both provision and repair and includes best practice across our product portfolios - Wholesale Line Rental (WLR), Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) and Superfast Fibre Access (SFFA)*. Step-by-step, the guide will take you through the key information that you should capture as a Communications Provider (CP) at the point of sale to submit to Openreach including; • Searching for and matching an address • Selecting and managing an appointment • Supplying onsite contact details and notes relevant to our engineering workforce • How to structure information so this is visible to the right people at the right time within Openreach Additionally we have provided information on how to notify us when you wish to cancel an order or fault and therefore no longer require an engineering visit. This will ensure any associated appointments are released early enough for them to be reused. There is also a section for your development and IT teams to ensure information that is captured by your agents is transmitted to us in the relevant fields. * Also known as Next Generation Access (NGA) or Generic Ethernet Access (GEA)

3. Point of Sale If your order is more complex than a simple transfer of service or a working line takeover, you will normally require an engineering visit. The following pages highlight the areas where you need to capture the appropriate information to ensure they are sent to us in the correct format. Before going into detail, it is important to recognise that, whilst the use of a ‘Gold Key’ against the main address may appear to speed up order entry and lead times, the absence of any relevant flat number or sub-premises detail, may result in the engineer being unable to locate the customer or the service being provided to the wrong premises. It is important to ensure that, when requesting a service into a complex address, such as a multi-occupancy building e.g. flat, unit or a house that has been recently divided, you will need to ensure that all the relevant low level address details are captured accurately. In the house divided example, please do not select ‘1 The Close’ just to select a ‘Gold Key’, if the actual address is now ‘1a or 1b The Close’. Please Note: If your customer is in a rented property, there is likely to be an obligation that they make their landlord aware of any new installation work and to obtain full permission in advance. In some cases landlords may restrict certain types of work, e.g. drilling or the location of equipment, which may also apply to repair. In such instances you will need to ensure that you follow your own local policies regarding advice to your customers on their obligations to any landlord.

4. Point of Sale

5. Point of Sale

6. Point of Sale *Hot Sites = All power generation/distribution facility and/or Area surrounding power generation/distribution facility

7. Point of Sale *Internal DP – For examples of internal distribution points please refer to Appendix B

8. Point of Sale

9. Point of customer contact related to a fault If your customer has contacted you to report a potential fault with their service, ensure that you have carried out all the appropriate diagnostic tests prior to raising a fault. Please ensure that you have taken the time to walk your customer through each of the relevant set of structured questions for the service they are consuming, prior to raising a fault. For example, you may be able to avoid a visit by ensuring your customer has unplugged their equipment at the NTE whilst you test the line. If you are unable to resolve the issue with your customer and you require Openreach to undertake further diagnostics, please raise the appropriate fault type into Openreach and ensure that a full description of the fault is provided within the relevant notes field. Please ensure you ask the customer to think through access to all of their current services, including extensions. If they have extensions in difficult to reach places (e.g. upstairs/lofts/external to main premises) make sure that access is available. You should notify us beforehand if there are any health and safety issues or access challenges of which our engineers need to be aware. Openreach offers a range of additional problem resolution services that can be ordered such as Special Fault Investigation and these are often product specific offerings. There are a range of user guides available on the Openreach website that highlight the fault diagnostic and reporting tools we have available.

10. Point of customer contact related to a fault

11. Point of customer contact related to a fault *Hot Sites = All power generation/distribution facility and/or Area surrounding power generation/distribution facility

12. Point of customer contact related to a fault

13. Managing Appointments on inflight orders

14. Managing Appointments on inflight orders

15. Managing Appointments on inflight faults

16. Managing Appointments on inflight faults

17. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community As our CP customer IT design community, you have the ability to ensure the solutions work effectively and efficiently end to end. You share responsibility for increasing the success of these solutions from the first customer contact, to the service being provided and billed. If you ensure the right information is captured, in the correct format and character length and passed to Openreach in the relevant fields, this will enable Openreach to present the correct information to the relevant parts of our organisation. For example if special access information notes are passed on as part of the order or fault, the likelihood of a successful engineering visit is increased significantly. The following slides highlight key information that your agents can capture in the correct fields to pass them onto Openreach.It is very important to note that each of these fields have character length limits and any extra characters you may provide will get truncated and important information may not reach our engineers. Hence it is key that you highlight to your agents, where possible, that they have exceeded the information for a specific field. If you are a B2B CP, you need to refer to the XML definition document which Openreach publish as part of release documentation. If you are a portal CP, most of these character length validations will be carried out by the portal during your order or fault placement journey.

18. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community LLU & SFFA/NGA Orders – CP Contact Details, Customer Access Notes *As this not an amendable attribute for LLU, any changes to these values after the order has been input by the customer will need to be communicated directly to the SMC

19. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community LLU & SFFA/NGA Orders – Customer User Contact Details *As this not an amendable attribute for LLU, any changes to these values after the order has been input by the customer will need to be communicated directly to the SMC

20. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community LLU & NGA Orders – Additional Site Visit Reason and Location Details

21. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community LLU & SFFA/NGA Faults – CP Contact Details & Customer Access Notes

22. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community LLU & SFFA/NGA Faults – Customer Contact Details

23. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community WLR Orders – Customer’s Primary & Secondary Contact Details

24. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community WLR Orders – Customer Access Notes and Additional Site Visit Reason

25. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community WLR Orders – CP Contact Details

26. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community WLR Faults – Customer’s Primary & Secondary Contact Details

27. Best Practice for the CP IT Design Community WLR Faults – Customer Access Notes & Fault Description Notes, CP Contact Details

28. Appendix A - RAMS statements

29. Appendix B – Example of an Internal DP If you have been advised via Manage Line Plant Availability (MLPA) that the premises is served by an internal Distribution Point, this will indicate that one is located somewhere inside your customer’s building or building complex and could be in a room that requires separate access, an example of what an Internal DP looks like is illustrated below.