In today’s economic climate, communications service providers (CSPs) are seeking ways to gain cost advantage while maintaining service leadership to attract new customers and retain existing ones. Moving to service-centric operations is a step in the right direction, but still does not fully address the fundamental business problems of why customers choose to stay with a service provider or make a change, and what builds a brand that attracts new customers.
A different approach is required, where the actual experience of customers defines the business strategy of the service provider. The result is the transformation we see today in CSPs, involving both network infrastructure as well as organizational changes, in order to focus on the customer, not just the network or services.
The need to manage the customer experience end-to-end puts new requirements on how the operations support system (OSS) and business support system (BSS) should support the business strategy and the service provider’s business processes, including provisioning, assurance and billing. Customer Experience Management (CEM) addresses all the facets of the interaction between the service provider and the customer.
An ideal customer-centric assurance solution should address the heart of the CEM process covering: detecting quality of experience problems, identifying them and their root cause, facilitating their resolution and ensuring ongoing preventative measures.
Too often, CEM only focuses on customer experience problems communicated into CRM and does not address the areas of identification and resolution. HP has examined current processes and tools in OSS and identified three key areas for improvement:
- Problem correlation and root-cause analysis
Quickly identifying a network resource problem and understanding its impact on services is the first step toward ensuring an optimized customer experience. Unfortunately existing approaches often fail to keep up with change, are difficult to maintain, and fail to address cross-technology problems. A radically different approach is required where the network structure is captured in a dynamic topology model that accurately reproduces the behavior of the real network.
- Integration across resource and service layers
Silo organizations, processes and applications prevent the move to customer-centric operations. The lack of consolidation across multiple network domains and equipment vendors may be addressed by a “manager of managers” approach. But more often, there is a lack of integration across vertical layers. Consolidating the resource and service management layers allows for linking network with service operations and enables efficient problem detection as well as identification and resolution, resulting in increased overall operations efficiency.
- End-to-end service quality management
A comprehensive customer-centric assurance solution must measure the customer experience by collecting metrics through passive probes, active probes and usage data. But being able to detect a customer experience problem is not sufficient. The solution must also correlate these metrics with other data sources, such as transaction and session statistics, network and services data, along with business-related data, in order to also identify and resolve the customer problem.
Read the complete HP white paper on
customer-centric assurance to understand the value of a customer experience management solution approach and how to take the first steps to begin this critical improvement.
