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Truly Managing the Customer Experience
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Measuring Network Service Isn’t Enough
For CSPs, providing the right customer experience is the key to boosting operational
efficiencies, building customer loyalty and growing wallet share. The goal is to
conquer new markets and generate new revenue streams while delivering the right
customer experience that keeps customers happy and the business profitable.
Today’s end-users are more sophisticated. They expect not only higher service quality,
but also a differentiated, consistent and transparent end-to-end customer experience.
As Exhibit 1 shows, CSPs must now move from measuring the quality of individual
services to measuring the complete end-user experience. The successful operator will
be the one that can capitalize on this trend and focus on total CEM.
Going Beyond the Basics
Managing the customer experience is not just about capturing customer information
and order requests; it requires a total transformation for the industry. CSPs must
evolve from an operational service strategy to a more customer-focused experience
management model. This is the only way they can differentiate themselves from the
competition and increase loyalty.
Current Operator Strategies Are Not Meeting Demand
CSPs in both mature and emerging markets face competition from aggressive entrants
that have changed the foundation of the industry.
In the industry today, we hear a consistent CEM drumbeat as service providers
struggle to transform their business and adopt the “customer is king” mantra.
Unfortunately, their solutions usually suffer from one or more of the following
ailments (see Exhibit 2):
They are too network-centric.
1) Teams view most of the world through the lens of network and QoS measurements.
2) These measures are too narrow and capture just one part of the experience. ••They
are too focused on customer relationship management (CRM) and customer care.
1) Function-specific, inside-out view tends to rely on internal measures of quality,
such as average hold time and call abandonment rates.
2) Such measures have nothing to do with the overall experience; they simply
measure service provider transaction response efficiency.
They are too service provider-centric.
1) Include only those attributes controlled directly by the service provider.
2) Do not include third-party capabilities such as downloads, ring tones, interconnect
handoffs, entertainment content and applications.
While industry bodies are in the process of developing the standards for CEM, quality
of experience (QoE) and key quality indicators (KQIs), vendors are continuing to
create their own initiatives to provide a way to measure end-to-end PSPU quality.
What is important is to construct a way to find the root cause of a problem and its
related impact on endusers’ QoE.
The challenge is to apply this knowledge across the company to enhance the user
experience while still retaining profitability for the operator.
Requirements for Transforming the Experience
Operators need to transform from networkcentric to user-centric management
practices. A user-centric approach focuses not only on availability, but also on key
factors such as accessibility, integrity, retainability and ultimately a customer’s
emotional experience.
Customer experience is a direct result of users’ observations, perceptions, thoughts
and feelings as they interact with the product, service or company throughout an
interval of time. Therefore, a complete CEM system must not only capitalize on
customer expectations, but also act on any possible changes in behaviors. It is
important not only to continually measure customers’ perceptions of network
improvements but also to ensure customers know what the operator is doing to
achieve those results.
Having a finger on the pulse of end-users’ perceived QoS can help operators expedite
the process of discovering areas where performance can be improved, and can in turn
dramatically impact the business across multiple constituents (see Exhibit 3).
Delivering the Framework for Success
To truly create a differentiated experience across the customer life cycle, operators
must use insight from both the service and product, service or company throughout an
interval of time. Therefore, a complete CEM system must not only capitalize on
customer expectations, but also act on any possible changes in behaviors. It is
important not only to continually measure customers’
Delivering the Framework for Success
To truly create a differentiated experience across the customer life cycle, operators
must use insight from both the service and the user to correlate data from the network,
devices and services, to understand, manage and predict their customers’
expectations.
Innovative Scenarios That Make Consistent Customer Experience a Reality
Getting more granular with end-to-end measurement of the customer experience not
only assists operations with better network infrastructure planning, but also helps
sales and service departments in improving operations and enhancing
revenue-generation opportunities.
To understand actual user experience, quantitative data findings must integrate
subjective inputs such as user satisfaction surveys or reports from the customer care
center. However, the process should be undergone in stages (see Exhibit 4).
SQM is the proper way to transition to CEM, because the network KPIs and KQIs are
already operational. This step provides the strong foundation necessary for a
successful CEM initiative: Having insight into network performance and service
quality leads to a better understanding of the customer experience. The following are
examples of how this insight can improve customer experience.
Proactively Resolve Problems and React at the Right Time
Proactive resolutions of customer problems are essential to avoid a customer
complaint call, and right-timing interactions—such as lowering average handle
time—will ensure customer satisfaction. It is important to monitor and proactively act
before a customer notices a problem or has the time to complain to a call center to
avoid not only a negative experience, but also increased costs to the contact center.
Reduce Average Call Handling Time for Customer Service Representatives
(CSRs)
By proactively identifying user issues, agents can more accurately and quickly solve
subscriber issues, ultimately lowering the cost to serve. Effectively understanding the
end-to-end service quality issue demarcation covering device, wireless network, core
network, IP backbone, backhaul, user behavior and even policy control will improve
the efficiency of the complaint-handling process to reduce the operational workload,
improve customer perception and increase ticket closure rate.
Monitor Revenue-Earning Transactions to Ensure Cross-Sell and Upsell
Success
Marketing departments are struggling with a multitude of complex issues related to
effective tariff plans, creation of valueadded services and overall benchmarking of
industry standards. Specifically, operators need to understand the emotional aspects
coupled with network KQIs before the creation of dynamic tariff plans so that target
customers will enjoy the personalized price without any bad experiences (e.g.,
network congestion, slow data connection), or they must validate the effectiveness of
dynamic traffic (by user-level traffic analysis).
A wealth of subscriber information can be used to understand subscribers’ needs,
interests and behaviors. This not only ensures the delivery of personalized offers, but
also guarantees that the service experience doesn’t negatively affect the brand.
Operators also should design, implement and verify policies to ensure adequate
resource availability for high-value end-users, services or applications based on
mobile broadband capacity assessment and forecasts aligned with the operator’s
business objective.
Supplier Spotlight: Huawei
While there are plenty of IP and circuit switch probe companies, they are not able to
dynamically resolve and meet today’s customers’ needs. In the optimization space,
these companies are missing the key point about the end-user experience during IP or
radio optimizations. Instead of falling into the trap of spending resources optimizing
good user experiences, ICT provider Huawei focuses on improving the bad ones. In
2012, Huawei made investments in research and development to build a solution that
moves the industry toward end-to-end CEM and enables proactive prevention. The
company believes its radio, IP and B/OSS technologies and strategic consulting can
make it a one-stop shop in the industry to confront customer experience challenges for
operators.
While the KQI model is structured by Telecom Management Forum (TMF) and is a
very broad concept in this industry, Huawei defines KQIs as a way to measure
end-toend PSPU quality. Furthermore, the KQI is structured to find the root cause and
deliver end-user QoE.
Huawei is redefining SQM from a per-service to a PSPU measurement to truly
measure the customer experience. It is applying its enduser QoE modeling with its
aggregated PSPU SQM (see Exhibit 5 on the next page).
Huawei helps CSPs analyze such business metrics as NPS and Customer Satisfaction
Index on an aggregated level and use them to identify customer experience issues and
challenges. Furthermore, Huawei can help integrate these metrics across the client
organization and improve them with a complete set of use cases across departments
and customer experience life cycle phases.
The current SmartCare trials are in the early stages of the service quality discovery
process. This initial phase to collect and analyze network performance data is being
conducted during the next few months. The results should provide the operator with
incremental improvements to its network performance and customer experience.
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