On the one hand, now is an unparalleled opportunity for growth. Increased competition in the network equipment market (including the introduction of many quality brands from China) has driven network costs down and allowed inorganic expansion of both coverage and service offerings. One result is that consumers are now enjoying the previously unfulfilled dream of an unwired world with quality applications that have meaningful impact on their lives.
On the other hand, the unexpected increase in network traffic, powered by the new apps and combined with no measurable increase in revenue per user, has already caused some mobile operators to lose precious market share to their competitors. To make matters worse, support issues associated with the new apps and services can take 10 times longer to isolate and resolve, especially with network-centric NOC and Customer Care paradigms in place.
These factors of explosive traffic, longer support time and more complex issues have created “the perfect storm” for mobile operators.
Many operators are managing this new environment well. This is great news, as it is proof of the mantra of all great long-standing companies: the customer comes first. Indeed, in today’s telecom environment, the customer is first and is also in control. Operators who fail to acknowledge this and then migrate to a more customer-centric form of operations and monitoring will quickly suffer the consequences.
To Compete, Operators Must Move to a More Customer-Centric Operations Model
Achieving this customer-centric enlightenment is not easy. It requires a different model for operations and a different type of technical toolset than network-centric operations.
To this day, network-centric operations, based largely on network statistics and network element (NE) alarms, provide a good indication of network health, but little insight into service-level issues or network/service interdependencies. Worse, the network-centric monitoring used by the NOC is largely unusable by the Customer Care department on the front lines due to its complexity and narrow scope of usable results.
By integrating customer-centric information from the services, subscribers and devices into the monitoring system, Customer Care now has a more relevant, more usable toolset for quickly diagnosing and resolving customer issues before they become trouble tickets. Moreover, the NOC is better equipped to work with Customer Care on specific customer issues, using a common analysis platform.
This sounds like a great goal, but in reality, how can it be done? Surprisingly, a lot of this capability exists already in the form of customer service assurance (CSA), one of the five key elements of an operator’s customer experience management (CEM) program. (The other four elements are acquisition, billing, retention and provisioning).
Defining Customer Service Assurance
Customer service assurance, in essence, is a natural evolution of the network management system (NMS) arena. As a reaction to the need for customer-centric approaches, the market has been bombarded with CSA messages of all sorts from vendors. Many are simply putting marketing messages on old network-centric approaches, while others are making a gradual move to measure and monitor specific services such as VoIP and IMS, but fall short of gathering customer-specific information.
Overall, where a traditional NMS is concerned with collecting inputs from the network and network elements to provide alarms, alerts and reporting on a network (as described above), CSA strives to take it one step further. It integrates customer-specific information from more sources, over more protocols and provides rapid analysis and correlation for immediate and historical use by the operator. The goal is to re-create the actual user experience.
This necessarily involves integrating with a provider’s CRM system and making all elements of a CSA system able to isolate on the information related to a specific customer, such as a VIP customer, business customer or a customer with a specific issue. Such a change requires the ability to collect a massive amount of information, sort through this information very rapidly and present key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboards in many views and angles.
Taking Customer Service Assurance to the Extreme
Although CSA is a becoming an established concept, in its typical form it is not enough. Almost any operator or vendor (who is being honest) will admit to massively underestimating the complexity and volume of signaling and data traffic traversing these next-gen networks, as well as the number of technologies and protocols that must be simultaneously served. A more extreme approach is required.
“Extreme” CSA requires collecting terabytes of call and data transaction information from probes that traverse the whole network and aggregating this information into CDRs (call data records) or xDRs (in the case of data transactions). These are not simple probes that pass on captured raw data, but intelligent probes that filter data, do correlation of the data across services and technologies, pass up condensed, indexed CDR information and keep additional drill-down detail on the call number, signaling and protocol stack available for later use.
A “turbo-charged” service quality analysis (SQA) engine is then required that can sort and analyze this information near real-time and generate a wide range of KPIs and dashboards. Based on these KPIs, customer service quality (CSQ) alerts must be generated and root cause information quickly supplied to both the NOC and Customer Care departments, and in a form that each will understand and find useful.
These capabilities must be provided over a wide range of applications. For example, an operator may have to simultaneously deal with mobile data service quality problems (requiring cell data throughput KPIs-versus-customer data throughput), mobile data service reliability problems (identifying problems with a specific RNC or SGSN, determining how many cells are affected, which customers are affected, etc.), and voice quality problems (typically for VoIP to verify accessibility, quality (MOS) or reliability of SIP or H.323 protocols).
A Specific Example of Extreme CSA
Applied Here is how one operator became proactive. First, terabytes of information were collected and segmented along the lines of technology data, corporate users, area data, device data and product data (operator product). Using the turbo-charged SQA engine mentioned above, KPIs were generated and captured and data was compared against group data and thresholds set by the operator. The tracking of many KPI dimensions was important, as it allowed the operator to quickly tell whether a given customer was experiencing issues related to the service, a specific area or cell, a device or a technology. More detailed root-cause views were then generated within these dimensions that gave Operations the ability to quickly drill down and examine the specific signaling data, protocol data and error messages.
In this example, some of the views and reports were customized for both Customer Care and Operations so they would align well with how this operator wanted to view their customers, networks and services. Integration was also done with the operator’s CRM system and trouble ticketing system so that call data was correlated with customer and device data and reflected in trouble tickets.
The result is that Customer Care was able to get more insightful data (troubleshoot the problem down to whether it’s a service, location, device, technology, etc.) on the nature of current problems with their VIP customers, better acknowledge this with the customer and more quickly resolve it with Operations (attaching report to a trouble ticket, looking at same data, etc.). They also were able to proactively examine potential issues with their VIP customers before the problems got worse and then work with Operations to correct the bad trends.
In a similar fashion, Operations was able to monitor and set KPIs, not just for network parameters, but for a wide range of groupings that more closely simulated the quality experienced by their selected customers (business customers, higher paying customers, etc.). The ability of Customer Care and Operations to access the same system expedited both the internal communications on the nature of the issues and allowed Operations to focus technical people on the more technical aspects of the root cause of the issue and fix it in a faster timeframe.
Moving Out of the Storm and On to Increased Market Share
In summary, mobile and converged operators are experiencing an explosion of mobile data traffic, a corresponding expansion of the customer care problems and a network/service complexity that is challenging their support resources. Since many customers have mobile subscriptions that are different from their fixed line subscription, the loyalty of a customer is primarily based on the experienced quality of their mobile service. Currently this experience leaves a lot to be desired and has resulted in large churn rates with many operators.
In order to decrease this churn as well as to capture market share from their competitors, operators are moving from network-centric operations to more customer-centric operations. This involves integrating with the CRM system and correlating the collected data into groups and dimensions so that the experience of specific customers can be more closely simulated. To implement a CSA program that is effective requires a passion and a willingness to take this to the extreme – collecting terabytes of information, segmenting this information into many relevant groupings and generating scores of KPIs in near real-time speed. It also requires making this information available to both Customer Care and Operations in views and reports that are easy to see, insightful and align well with their other systems and processes.
So, whether the current telecom environment represents a time of opportunity or a time of crisis depends largely on each operator. By having a passion for the customer experience and taking extreme measures to collect and analyze customer information, operators can proactively monitor their higher paying customers, improve the service quality these customers are experiencing and reduce their churn. Operators that have begun to put these tools, processes and actions in place have already begun to see an increase in both customer satisfaction and market share. Carpe diem!
Dave Bellandi is chief marketing officer for Accanto Systems. He has more than 20 years of experience in strategic and outbound marketing with employers including Hewlett-Packard, Agilent and FrontRange Solutions (Goldmine). Over the past six years, he has focused on sales and marketing techniques and practices to grow revenue in small to mid-sized software, Internet and marketing services companies.
