One year on from acquiring Telcordia for more than US$1 billion and more recently the acquisition of ConceptWave, Ericsson continues to see great potential for CSPs to extract great value from the data they collect and analyse in their OSS and BSS systems. Here, Per Borgklint, senior vice president and head of Business Unit Support Solutions at Ericsson, tells George Malim how concepts of fresh and slow data need to be understood and identified to feed customer experience management systems with the right information at the right time. Borgklint, who has led retail-based operations for fixed and mobile networks at Tele2 and Dutch operator Versatel, says CSPs will serve customers better and more effectively monetise on their network investments if they refine their approaches and move from reactive CRM to proactive CEM.
VanillaPlus: CEM seems to be used to describe all sorts of functions related to the end user experience. What is the true meaning of customer experience management?
Per Borgklint: You’re right that it’s a very broad abbreviation that is used in a lot of cases. From the CSP perspective it’s about being able to provide timely, intelligent input to deliver actionable insight in real-time. In addition, it’s about making sure CSPs can improve the overall customer experience, drive loyalty and increase ARPU and create a valuable customer perception of the service. It’s more advanced than being only reactive.
A large part of what CSPs are doing today is in voice but in data CEM becomes very important because you are getting into a situation with a very high level of differentiation. If you’re providing video or a live event or addressing services like healthcare, the ability to ensure quality of service is delivered and the ability to inform users in real-time about services and impacts could, if you take it to the extreme, be the difference between life and death.
More routinely it could make the difference between a customer staying or going. For example, a video outage or a break in a scene makes a lot of people very, very annoyed. When you’re moving from linear to non-linear experiences CEM becomes even more important and because of that it will gradually increase in importance.
VP: Why is CEM more than old-fashioned CRM? What greater value does it bring both to the customer, in terms of improved experience, but also to the CSP as a means to provide services more efficiently while ensuring user satisfaction?
PB: I think it’s good you use the description old-fashioned CRM. CRM cements an old way of working. When you became a customer of a CSP you weren’t able to choose services because CRM is a logistical tool that isn’t able to extract experience-related data in a timely way. As customers ourselves, we’re used to being able to have more impact on our own customer experience to a greater extent than CRM will allow. CRM is mainly focused on internal efficiencies and not necessarily on how you create the best experience for the customer.
CEM focuses on operations and processes based on customers’ needs in a more integrated OSS and BSS environment. It’s about creating efficiency gains where you can move the layer of configuration from an internal thing to an external thing for the benefit of the customer.
That will demonstrate greater value over time. In the short-term greater value is about having the ability to extract aspects of the customer experience that are not living up to customer expectations. In the future, it will become about the ability to deliver specific things you know a certain customer will be interested in based on their behaviour, their geography, their circumstances and other information you have.
In reality services will become much more advanced and interactions between different operations will increase. At the same time, intelligence of solutions will increase and the user will be able to have a far greater impact on what they do.
VP: Should OSS and BSS continue to be regarded as separate disciplines or is the interplay between the two now so intense that traditional demarcations are evolving in a unified approach to the back office? How does CEM fit into that unification?
PB: The interplay is that they are melting together in terms of how a consumer experiences the overall offering but, from an internal perspective they still have different roles to play. BSS is there to ensure that revenue is being charged for in a flexible, controlled manner that gives the CSP the ability to capitalise on different types of user behaviour over the network.
OSS is internal as well as external. Inventory management, for example, gives the CSP a very clear picture of what they can do. Information from inventory management can be used as a trigger to generate sales leads. For example, if fibre is connected to a 50 storey building inventory management systems would be able to tell radio planners that fibre is there. Sales can be triggered by the knowledge that fibre will be in this building by a specific date. You can combine inventory management with other areas of value creation within the CSP. That’s not how it’s being used today, it’s very reactive but it can become proactive.
VP: CEM isn’t only about CSPs’ relationships with their customers. How can targeted CEM aid and enable new service development?
PB: I think that if you go from 2G voice and SMS to 3G and the first data services where the personalisation was low, when you get to 4G the behaviour is very different. A 70-yearold’s behaviour will be very different to a 17- year-old’s. If you can extract this information in real-time you can create service packaging in very efficient ways in a unified product catalogue and deliver that to the customer in the right place at the right time. For an application running either over the network or via an over-the-top (OTT) provider delivery of self-service capability is based on different [sources of] data that are used to create selfservice capability. That’s how CEM enables any service that needs a specific quality of service to be enhanced. That also ties in with extracting the right data to create an ecosystem around behaviour and individual needs.
VP: To get the complete picture, CSPs need to draw CEM data from both the network and the handset. How can they make the most of combined handset and network data? What challenges are involved?
PB: Network data is just one part of the whole information available. You also need to understand the handset or terminal capabilities. Serving a specific user who has a specific device and combining different services together means you have to understand the different integrations, service layers and how they integrate.
From a theoretical point of view the challenge is not that difficult but from a practical point of view extracting the data is difficult. There is such a large volume of data but instead of talking about big data, I’d prefer to focus on fresh data – the data that needs to be extracted quickly and acted on. Slow data that can be extracted later won’t necessarily impact customers’ real-time requirements. Fresh data requires intelligence on a different level and differs from CSP to CSP.
The ability to bring these data assets out of the network and transform and transport them in the right way is a challenge and will take time to address. In practice that requires you to understand what data is valuable. Big data is too wide an approach you need to assess which data needs to be treated while it is fresh and which data can be left and treated as slow data. It’s like selling fish – what can’t be sold that day needs to be frozen immediately. That requires specialist knowledge of the network and of customer behaviour and how you utilise that through policy control all the way through to the end user device or customer premise equipment.
This is a core area for Ericsson and one that we see as very important. We’re continuing to develop our solutions and services in OSS/BSS because we see substantial value extraction potential in these solutions.
