Mobile operators need new approaches to close the gap between what their networksreport and what their customers tell them, argues Neil Coleman
Over the last two to three years, we have seen growing tensions between customer care and network operations teams in mobile operators. Customer care agents find themselves handling more and more customer complaints at the same time as the operations team report ‘all green’ network status.
The problem with being network centric:
This problem has its origins in the exponential rise in mobile data, increased competition and industry deregulation. The result of this means that operators now face a perfect stoof increasing network and device complexity coupled with slowing revenue growth, rising subscriber acquisitio costs and a lack of customer loyalty. Operators have been investing in Customer Experience Management (CEM) initiatives but these systems, with their focus on high level end to end monitoring, lack the granular detail to enable them to address the real causes of the problems especially in RAN that accounts for 20% of all customer churn. Mobile operators’ traditional approach for assuring customer experience has been network centric, with management, employees and outsourcers being measured on their ability to improve overall network KPIs.This network centric approach misses the voice of thecustomer. Operators lack hard data on the quality of experience they deliver to key customer segments at critical locations and also don’t have data on how their network supports the latest devices. Being network centric also means that operators struggle to:
• focus sales and marketing campaigns where their network is a differentiator
• target investments in network infrastructure (macro, femto and Wi-Fi) to deliver maximum benefit to key customers
• prioritise in-house and outsourced resources on activities that have the greatest customer impact
Forget the network, focus on people and places
To close the customer experience gap requires operators to become customer centric, shifting their focus from network elements to people and places. Being customer centric means that operators should be able to answer fundamental questions like:
• Where are my corporate customers when they’re not in the office, are they dropping calls and is it a location, network or a device specific problem?
• Is my network capacity being consumed by rogue users or handsets?
• Are the problems being reported by my customers specific to one location, one handset type or one service?
To address these questions, operators need to invest in customer experience optimisation solutions. These systems compliment traditional network OSS and CEM systems by providing granular customer experience data, geo-located and segmented by customer and handset type. These systems allow operators to follow a customer centric approach by:
• establishing customer experience KPIs to prioritise customer impacting activities
• allowing customer experience data to be used to diagnose problems, target investment and
design solutions
• enabling key processes to focus on improving customer experience KPIs.
The benefits of customer centricity
To illustrate the benefits of customer centricity, an operator we have been working with spent a number of months trying to address an unusually high rate of dropped calls on a small cluster of sectors. It initially took a network centric approach, adjusting network configuration without success. Taking a customer centric approach, focusing on people and places, it quickly saw the drops originated at a bus station, where people, waiting for their rides home used their smartphones. Unfortunately the bus station was underneath a concrete railway bridge, meaning that changes to the macro network had little effect and that a local coverage solution was required.
