Keith Dyer examines how the concept of customer assurance is taking shape in the mindset of operators, and the key market drivers which are paving the way for its widespread implementation
For a while now the providers of systems and software to monitor the performance of your network have been talking of service assurance as the key differentiator for mobile operators. It wasn’t enough for an operator to know his network was performing; but to know how the services he ran over his networks were performing. This was known as service assurance, and the big advantage of this was that people other than the technical support and operations centres could receive reports on service performance. This meant product management, marketing and customer service could all receive reports and, in many cases, view live how a service was performing.
But now, a new term is in the air, and it is customer assurance. The implication of customer assurance is really that it takes service assurance one step further. Instead of just seeing how a service is performing, across your core, 2G, 3G or whatever network you have in mind, you can actually see how a customer, or a group of customers, is experiencing the service.
The idea is that by putting the customer at the centre of the service assurance world, operators can offer VIP customers and corporate customers a differentiated class of service.
So is there more to this than just words? Does the concept of customer assurance actually entail any new technology, methods of working, and how does it add value to an operator’s business model?
Seth Nesbitt, director of product marketing, Amdocs, takes a bullish view. “It’s certainly about more than a PowerPoint presentation. Investment decisions show there is movement towards this. Service assurance without taking customers into account is missing the point. Everyone agrees that there is currently an extremely large effort in service assurance – and customer awareness and knowledge is driving that growth, It’s absolutely a key topic at the moment.”
Keiron Moynihan, cto Vallent, says that the big driver of customer assurance as a concept has been the need to support SLAs for enterprise customers, focusing on user experience versus mere service availability.
“For service management solutions, nine times out of ten the focus is on enterprise customers, who have got strong contracted SLAs. For example, our largest customer, Cingular, is now offering full enterprise SLAs to business customers across five areas: accessibility, retainability, latency, throughput and customer care effectiveness.”
But he agrees the emphasis on terminology can drown out what is actually happening.
“A lot of it is in words and terminology to be honest. We have customers across every continent, and what’s happening is a big push for the area of service management, and service visibility. If you are going to do anything around customer experience management, you need a foundation of what’s happening to the services being delivered to do anything beyond that.”
Soeren Danielsen, director product marketing, Anritsu, says, “In a way it’s new and in a way it’s old. The thing is we have always had SLA monitoring in a network, so from the technical point of view it’s not really new. What’s new is that all aspects of the service line put the customer in the centre.”
“You often see that people in customer support get a trouble ticket and that’s not really transferable to people who handle the customer from a technical point of view. And so they don’t know who the key customer is who may be complaining every day. And if your VIP customer is lost you also lose a lot of money. If the customer support person had a system linked to the major account manager, and product management, if you can put customer in centre of all this you have a much better way of reacting and even doing something proactively This is the new thing about the working process.
“Does it change the way operators need to work? Yes, because service providers don’t have the presence at the moment to support it and very often the tools, monitoring, trouble ticketing systems and so on.”
Hype all over the place
Randy Custeau, responsible for the strategy and marketing for Agilent’s OSS Group, says, “We’re seeing hype all over the place.” Custeau’s point is that although operators are offering SLAs to enterprises, and talking the language of customer assurance, many times they are not talking about actual network prioritization and true customer assurance.
“The ability to offer it is not there yet, the service level guarantee is not there yet. Solutions being offered do tend to be network related. What operators are doing is throwing people at it to get that satisfaction. They haven’t automated this with a set of tools yet, that’s what they’re going through to at this point in time.”
That said, Custeau makes the point that there is a lot that can be done. Monitoring of network links can generate a lot of information on the reasons for hard and soft failures of a service. For instance, a system could pick up on an incorrectly configured phone, or an incorrectly entered url, and invoke an OTA platform to “heal” the phone, meaning the service “failure” can be turned into a satisfactory customer experience.
Or he gives an example of an operator taking a problem ticket, linking it to a group of IMSIs and linking that to a particular corporate client, and take a proactive approach to problem management – something which he says service providers are not really used to doing – as opposed to waiting for a support call to come in.
Moynihan points out that Cingular is indeed providing a service which monitors a group of IMSIs.
“Service management systems are now monitoring to IMSI level,” he contends, “So Cingular is now monitoring, in real time, a group of IMSIs as part of an enterprise group. That management is prompting day-to-day operations based around the impact to their service. For example if you have a geographical issue on GPRS you will prioritise enterprise customers over SMS traffic. So operators are getting more sophisticated at shaping management priorities around the customer and revenue impact.
“The ability to prompt day-to-day operations based on service customer revenues rather than the network-centric focus – that’s quite a big shift going on at most service providers.”
So where does the concept of customer assurance take operators in terms of their internal processes. How do you put the customer at the centre of a process, giving your customer service, marketing, product management and technical and operational teams access to relevant information?
Nesbitt says, “OSS has been network facing and focused, and it’s been difficult to understand how events affect customers. What we’re seeing is a consolidation of problem management systems onto a single instance, or a dramatic reduction in instances to break down those barriers. So a single instance for network faults, customer faults, IT problems, means your customer focus can be on one same system. This is the key strategy for service assurance and customer assurance, or what we call customer-centric service assurance.”
Key issues
Moynihan says that a customer assurance approach affects key issues affecting operators, namely third party content management, and service introduction.
“There are now so many content providers that service providers are involving them in their overall Quality Programme, as they are a critical part of the service delivery chain, working with the content provider to ensure content and positive brand perception is delivered to their customers.
“Product management teams are pushing hard to roll out services quickly, but the network operations group is struggling to cope to manage new services. In UMTS the early experience of many services has been quite patchy and quite poor. If you look at the take rates for services, operators are tracking that back to the disappointment of early user experience issues.”
That tracking back, looking at user experience, has led to a reorganization amongst operators.
“We’re finding that internally operators are moving forward on how to handle a spreading service portfolio, and there have been changes in the last two years, reorganising how they are managing their portfolio of services. Up to now only network operations covered service quality, and now that is shifting to product management, customer care, all with service quality management on the desktop.”
Soeren Danielsen says that operator business priorities mandate that customer assurance will keep heading up the list of priorities.
“If you look at the annual report of any service provider you will see his ARPUs need to go up. At the same time he can’t spend a fortune to gain a customer or lose a customer who’s been acquired. The launch of new services is a differentiator, but if you launch ten new services and don’t execute on the perceived quality as seen by the end user, then you really don’t have a solution. If don’t have a tool that allows you to meet customer experience you can’t really execute on all those new services.”
But the message is getting through, Danielsen says. “In terms of processes, in the last one to two years we’ve seen our customers shift from a network view to a service view, and now to a customer view. They are quite mature and very much aware – and want solutions.”
“To be brutally honest both companies like ourselves and service providers are operating in a learning mode, and we don’t have it spot on yet. So we’re still learning – but the technology is there.”
Nesbitt thinks we are seeing the “beginning of a move as things get more complex, and operators move to a content and partner based business model.
“There is the strategy of customer management, but in this space, really it’s not just assurance but fulfillment and the merger of information around fulfillment and assurance. So we need a common service view across services and fulfillment, across the silos of billing, CRM, and ordering capabilities. Fulfillment and assurance are two sides of the same coin, so we’ll see more activity there.”
And so, as ever, onwards…