In the News
Searching Wide and Deep for the Customer Experience
Customer Experience Management is Worthwhile and Achievable Approach for Service Providers, but Still Takes Network Focus to Achieve
8/19/2008, Tim McElligott, Billing & OSS World
Service providers always have looked for external validation about their level of customer satisfaction. An entire industry of subjective measurement systems grew up around this need. Today, service providers are gaining the confidence to do what all healthy adults should do: look deep inside for their own validation.
It is ironic that with all the emphasis on customer centricity over the last year or two and all the lambasting of telecom’s supposedly narrow-minded, network view of the business, all the data required to achieve, measure and understand this new world view of customer centricity comes from, where else, the network. Like network management, Customer experience management (CEM) will be achieved by manipulating the reams of data the network itself provides.
CEM may be a corporate buzzword to some, but money talks and when a company like Global Crossing Ltd. says that in 2008 it will invest one-third of its capital expenditures in the development of the seamless, holistic customer experience, that means something.
And when companies such as Sunrise Telecom Inc. and Velocent Systems are developing tools to help measure that customer experience, that means something too. Together, they mean that CEM may be as Karl Whitelock, senior consulting analyst of OSS/BSS Global Competitive Strategies at Stratecast, said, “the final piece to the customer [satisfaction] puzzle.
However, CEM still has a few pieces of its own puzzle missing. As Global Crossing customer experience officer, Laurinda Pang, said earlier this year, “The next level of customer support comes only if a holistic view of customers is possible.”
Whitelock calls this holistic view a common customer data record and defines it as a common representation of the customer across all OSS. “It is a key architectural requirement,” he said.
He also said some service providers are making progress on developing such a view, but that given consolidation throughout the industry and network complexity in general, it isn’t easy. And without this common customer data record with which a service provider can compare the plethora of usage and service quality data retrieved from the network, CEM falls back to being a mere corporate buzzword.
Assuming service providers are working feverishly to develop this common view, we will look instead to the emerging methods for making sense of all the network data.
Bruce Peterson, founder and CEO of Velocent Systems, believes his company’s method of deep packet inspection (DPI) can provide all the information wireless GSM operators need to measure the customer experience. It generates end-to-end key performance indicators and key quality indicators from the metadata and hundreds of thousands of measurements it takes each day from the biggest aggregation point in the network: the Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN). The GGSN acts as a gateway between the wireless data network and other networks or the Internet.
Peterson says the true measure of CEM comes from the user plane rather than the control plane of the network. It looks at the usual culprits of service degradation — congestion, throughput, latency, service drop detection and service type classifcation — for every session. “Ninety-five percent of data is user data. And understanding key performance indicators in the user plane can give mobile operators a competitive advantage,” Peterson said.
The Velocent VSE 2000 is an IP Service Assurance product that performs DPI. A single unit, which can be stacked in a 19-inch rack, has 3gbps throughput and can analyze 500,000 sessions per hour. The monitoring system uses a statistical analysis approach that identifies anomalies on various service delivery components. “We plug into the network and within seven minutes, we are seeing anomalies. That’s pretty much real time in telecom,” Peterson said. “Looking at hundreds of millions of measurements makes the difference.”
Peterson believes the mobile broadband industry has reached its inflection point. As a result, mo bile operators will need to support data flow with enhanced network intelligence, which will come through the inspection of data packets to determine service quality. “The walls to the garden have failed,” Peterson said. “The cable [network] is broken because of peer-to-peer and the wireless network could be broken by video. So operators need to act now.”
They have three options, Peterson said. They can significantly increase spending on infrastructure, wait for 4G upgrades or manage more intelligently. “So in the end they really only have one option,” he said.
DPI is used for intelligently managing networks and classifying service types in two ways. A centralized solution provides a high-level visibility into service classifications by inspecting data streams outside the network and using broad classifications such as MMS, e-mail or VoIP. Velocent provides a decentralized solution that classifies services down to the cell site level.
“It’s not just about looking at Layer 2 anymore,” Peterson said. “We have to look at Layers 4 and 5 to understand the service and at Layer 7 to understand the impact.”
Velocent is a startup based in Naperville, Ill., and is working with a Tier 1 wireless operator, which it may announce by the end of the year.
Whitelock said DPI alone won’t do the trick when it comes to measuring the customer experience, particularly because it is an IP-focused solution and much TDM traffic exists. And as deep as DPI vendors can go, “They still have trouble getting to the customer level,” Whitelock said.
But as Whitelock also said, input must come from all directions to form a meaningful picture of the customer experience.
So the packet isn’t the only place to take a measure of the customer experience. The signaling stream always has provided a bounty of information about the customer experience and to take advantage of this data source, Sunrise Telecom recently introduced its Mobile X-Ray Mobile data services analysis platform.
Mobile X-Ray is an intelligent monitoring and analysis product for diagnosing and managing mobile data services. The reason it addresses CEM so well is it correlates information from the network, the services themselves, from subscribers and devices. It acts as a vertical application that sits on top of the company’s service assurance platform known as TAMS.
Together with Sunrise’s 3Gmaster and NeTracker protocol analyzers, they form the company’s CEM architecture. Since launching Mobile X-Ray in April, Sunrise has sold it to customers such as O2 Communications, Qwest Communications Inc., Telecom Italia and Telefonica and has partnered with HP, IBM Corp., Telcordia Technologies Inc. and Oracle Corp. for business intelligence and OSS integration.
“We believe that by looking at the protocol streams, we can abstract a view that can offer different perspectives and angles to a service,” said Rossano Piccinini, head of Sunrise Telecom’s Protocol Products Group in Italy.
Piccinini said the differing perspectives can be used by different parts of an organization and that each can manipulate the same data to get a desired view. For example, one group can take a service view to see which service provides the best revenue while another group looks at which devices offer the most satisfying experience. He said that with a single box, he can analyze both signaling streams and streams of traffic representing user activity.
While the technology Sunrise uses to gather and analyze streams of data is its own, no one works in a vacuum when it comes to CEM. The company takes some of its cues from the TM Forum regarding which KPIs give the best measure of the customer experience. It takes other cues from Whitelock’s paper on CEM called “Measuring the Customer Experience Gets More Teeth,” which, in part, describes four basic data measurements from which to draw parameters to form a customer experience perspective.
The company focuses on Whitelock’s four data measures: location coverage, subscriber group, services used and the customer device. The first contains data not only on current location but roaming status and history. Subscriber group information includes perhaps the value of a customer, the user groups he or she may belong to (i.e. iPhone users) and a summary of services subscribed to. The service category defines the service type, as well as KPIs such as its status regarding accessibility and quality. The customer device category — perhaps the most difficult to assess — includes the handset type and firmware installed and its status in bandwidth allocation and roaming.
Although Sunrise, Velocent and most others talk in terms of KPIs for determining the customer experience, Whitelock says that is not the right approach. “KPIs are more about whether something works or doesn’t work. You have to build information that can be aggregated around a customer and then you can bump that up against the KPI.”
Recent research by Yankee Group confirms Whitelock’s view that a common or aggregate view of the customer is still lacking. A study called “Beyond the Customer Experience Hype: Where Are Service Providers Today in Delivering the Ideal Customer Experience?” showed service providers have neither a common cross-functional view of their customers nor consistent business processes in place to deliver the experience they want to. In fact, the study showed they still are working on a definition of the customer experience itself.
The research, commissioned by Amdocs, also shows there is little agreement on how KPIs should be used in CEM. “A lot of the KPIs service providers use today are more inside-out indicators rather than outside-in, meaning they are more operational in nature than customer-focused,” said Scott Kolman, managing director of product marketing at Amdocs. “It will be critical to leverage information about the customer as an asset. But it is not a trivial effort to leverage.
While 70 percent of service providers recognize business processes have a direct impact on the customer experience, 28 percent of them do not have dedicated resources to manage their internal business processes. Nor do they have the proper KPIs to measure the customer experience, according to the report.
Calling the quality of experience the last remaining differentiator between service providers, Sheryl Kingstone, director at Yankee Group, said, “Service providers today see the value in investments to better their customer experience, but many lack the holistic vision necessary to determine what this experience needs to be and an effective strategy to address both systems and business processes to assure a successful, low-risk transformation.”
With all the uncertainty over delivering and defining the customer experience, it is good to know that there will be no lack of methodology to monitor and measure it.