Service provisioning is the design or modification of a telephone service configuration to meet a customer's requirements. Telephone services are features that provide telephone functionality, such as call forwarding, or teleconferencing. Service representatives are workers, employed by the telephone company, who field calls from customers. While a customer and a service representative speak on the telephone, the representative accesses and enters information into multiple databases via a terminal.
The number of services available (particularly for business customers) is very large, and there are constraints on how services may be combined. Customers calling in do not know what services are available, or how their particular needs can be met by the available services. It is the representative's job to help customers define their needs for a telephone service and to explain the possibilities for addressing their needs.
This section describes the domain of service provisioning in terms of the tasks workers do, the tools and information sources they use to do the tasks, and the problems they experience.