Handset Health

"My phone doesn't work," the subscriber says. Is there a cheap, easy way to determine why?

If a subscriber returns a handset because it "doesn't work," do you:

a) Just apologize and give him a new handset, or

b) Give him a loaner and send the handset off for repair, or

c) Try to figure out in front of him what's wrong?

If you answered b or c, you've probably found that in-house troubleshooting, whether it's at the point of sale or a return depot, can be time-consuming and imprecise. But that's changing, thanks to what's known as "triage" tools: simplified, user-friendly T&M gear that allows sales clerks and other non-technical personnel to do basic troubleshooting rather than simply accepting the subscriber's claim that the phone doesn't work and returning it for repair.

In-store troubleshooting can be tough, if only because the problem can be due to a wide range of causes, including dead batteries, dropping it in a puddle or poor coverage.

"We found that a triage tool was necessary to determine which of these was actually affecting the phone's performance — or if there's a performance issue at all," said Bill Tull, Wavetek Wandel Golterman market-development manager, North America. "Having a triage tool at the point of sale or point of return (provides) proof whether the phone has a problem. If they're just given another mobile, their problems might continue if, for example, it's a network issue. So you've got a dissatisfied customer, and they get more frustrated and tell their friends, and the carrier gets a bad reputation."

Cheap Answers
A bad reputation isn't the only result of limited in-store testing. If returns are sent directly to the vendor or a third-party repair center, it's likely that they'll include a fair amount of no-fault-found (NFF) handsets, phones suffering no more than, say, a dead battery. Using a triage tool helps keep the number of NFF phones to a minimum.

"You should (catch) well (over) 90%," said Stephen Wood, Tektronix product-marketing manager. "The odds of you not catching the NFF aren't good. It would be a case of something being screwed up by the technician."

By one estimate, vendors and repair centers charge as much as $60 for each NFF phone, so weeding out good handsets can save significant money.

"We found in some cases over 50% of NFF phones being returned to a repair center," Tull said. "You've got the postage, inventory and NFF charge from the repair facility. In some of our studies, that added up to close to $100 per phone."

Hidden Answers
Asking questions is an obvious first step toward determining the problem's source.

"Most of our retail stores have some type of service tech, (and) customers who experience problems normally use them," said Mike Cost, BellSouth Wireless Services director of product planning. "We have a basic Q&A to determine what the customers are experiencing: battery problems, signal problems, static and dropped calls. Based on the customer's response, we are then able to properly examine the unit and determine further needs."

Based on Cost and Wood's experiences, dead batteries are a leading reason for returns. But for all the broken antennas and gummed-up keypads, some phones do have their quirks, which can result in performance poor enough to prompt a return. In some cases, a poor design can cause just as many headaches as inconsistent quality during the manufacturing process.

"In the United States, there's no certification program like you get for GSM in Europe," Wood said. "By virtue of that, you get interesting variances from manufacturers. We were in (one manufacturer's) labs, and they showed us this phone and said it failed three out of every five times. But it was in the design of the phone."

A good phone can appear bad if the test is done incorrectly. One potential point of failure is the cable connecting the phone to the test tool. Connectors tend to be fragile, and a bad connection, whether it's due to a worn connector or an inexperienced clerk, can result in bad test results.

"We believe that you'll induce some degree of error simply in doing the testing with a physical connection," Wood said.

To reduce those errors and the need for an expensive library of cables to accommodate every phone's proprietary connector, most triage tools avoid connectors in favor of simply placing the handset in a shielded box.

"We have a planar antenna that has a gripper on top," Wood said. "You simply insert the phone into the gripper, squeeze it shut, close the box, and you're communicating immediately. The cables are all static, so the calibration stays good."

Tough Answers
If triage tools are so handy, why aren't more wireless-service providers and third-party retailers using them? One reason is that they're relatively new. Tools such as Agilent Technologies' PoST, Tektronix' CMD80 "GO" and Wavetek Wandel Golterman's MMF 4350 either are just hitting the market or have been commercially available for only about a year.

Another is that screening processes for returned handsets vary widely.

"In random checks, we found that when we took in a phone and expressed that we had a problem, sometimes they would provide a new phone without doing any testing," Tull said. "Others would go through a vigorous screening process to check the phone, ensure that it would place calls and make sure that all the digits worked."

A phone that passes and can make calls still might have problems. One example is a subscriber who has a good phone but happens to frequent areas with poor coverage.

"My speculation is that a lot of what's going on is customers are running into coverage problems and interpreting them as phone failures," Wood said. "From the operator's perspective, it's arguable whether you wish to disabuse the customer of that impression. It's much easier to give them another phone than it is to tell them that you're going to put up another base station."

The irony is that although triage tools reduce the amount of technical know-how necessary to do basic troubleshooting, they also increase the amount of tact needed, especially if the problem can't be explained away as just a dead battery.

"If the customer brings in a phone, and I say that it's working wonderfully, then he has only a limited number of choices for blaming it on something else," Wood said. "Either he can blame himself, and that isn't likely, or he can blame the coverage, and you don't want that, either. But if you cycle the phone in his hand, then he's going to continue trying. That may be a desirable outcome from some carriers' perspective. They have to trade off the idea of immediate response with undesirable information versus the overhead of having to recondition the phone. We're seeing that the carriers are sharply divided on how they're doing this. Some absolutely refuse to do any testing at the point of sale."