Network statistics can mislead – real-time business analytics are required

As CSPs grapple with providing improved customer experience to their users it has become clear that the network-oriented approaches to quality of the past do not provide sufficient granularity to establish a true picture of the actual experiences customers are receiving. In addition, the network-based approach doesn’t enable CSPs to prioritise the needs of their most profitable customers. Instead, what is needed is a real-time business analysis platform to deliver these valuable insights, Jarkko Multanen the chief executive and director of Accanto Systems tells VanillaPlus

VanillaPlus: How can CSPs optimise their network investments by applying quality of experience (QoE) data to their operations?

Jarkko MultanenJarkko Multanen: By measuring the QoE of all the individual users of a CSP’s services, we understand the quality of service (QoS) of every service and we know the profile of the users that are using each service. CSPs need to focus on the return on investment of the individual user hence they need the capability to target QoE levels according to the value of each customer.

The high ARPU customers should receive a better experience, so CSPs need the capability to segment and profile their customers. Accanto solutions are able to categorise user groups into usable data or addressable metrics. For example, our solutions can identify users that have higher ARPU but bad QoE and can highlight where CSPs need to focus first in order to have the greatest impact.

About Accanto SystemsWith roots in networking and OSS, Accanto Systems was established in 1996 to deliver customer experience management systems to CSPs to help them overcome the challenges associated with managing services in converged, next-generation telecoms architectures.

Accanto Analytics is a platform hosting a wide array of innovative Business Analytics and Customer Experience Management applications. Its high performance event processing capabilities, together with extreme flexibility, enables Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring and analytics for each individual subscriber in a multi-vendor environment. Through highly sophisticated analytical algorithms Analytics process network and customer data providing direct business value to service providers.

Of course, it’s very important that we can demonstrate a rapid ROI of our systems and Accanto has certain key use cases which quickly demonstrate our value. Our systems prioritise network investment and maintenance by enabling CSPs to see where their network is performing badly and we can identify the types of customers that are impacted. We rank the areas [of the network] based on the number of high value customers being impacted by bad quality of service at each location. In this way operations can move away from network-only statistics and focus on the customer experience.

In the past, CSPs would have relied on a top ten list of badly performing cell sites and each would be addressed individually. However, this took no account of the actual impact on the customer service and relied on measuring the performance of the network. Traditional rankings may have found issues that caused 1,000 people to have a bad experience. With our ranking, we select areas where people are experiencing bad QoE – not necessarily network problems and by doing so; we can identify 4,000 people having a bad experience. We achieve that for the same investment so our customers receive a great ROI.

VP: Why do you think that the association of customer and network data can bring benefits to CSPs?

JM: CSPs focus too much on the network. We have demonstrated that network statistics can be misleading because they don’t provide visibility of the customer experience. With approaches like ours you can understand what is behind the numbers.

CSPs, for example, need to know how many VIP customers are suffering and if a problematic cell is impacting QoE. It may not be impacting QoE at all. By taking an approach like ours you can correctly prioritise your actions. QoE is what should be driving network operations.

VP: What do you mean by QoE driven operations and what does a QoE index mean to Accanto?

JM: QoE to us is data. Every time a customer does something – whether it’s a voice or data service – we are continuously calculating the QoE that they are receiving. Every time they are happy it is recorded in the QoE index, and every time they have a problem it is recorded and their QoE index goes down. We create what is effectively the trend of a user’s experience. It enables CSPs to be able to categorise people so they can, for example, find the 5% of people experiencing the worst service. CSPs can then prioritise those customers who are of high value.

CSPs key pressures are maintenance and investment on the network and both are now driven by QoE.

VP: What is the difference in return on investment when your systems are utilised in comparison to traditional OSS tools? What’s the advantage for CSPs and their customers?

JM: The greatest difference compared to traditional management systems used by network planners is the capability to optimise capacity and coverage. With our system you can optimise how many customers you are serving with your investment. We are able to provide recommendations because we know what network assets VIP users are on and we know exactly which ones are causing problems for the QoE level. Therefore we can provide a highly optimised list of investment priorities for CSPs to focus on if they want to provide enhanced QoE.

VP: What features or unique selling points will keep vendors in this market ahead of their competition?

JM: We have spent a lot of time analysing our business case. Our competition are mainly probe Jarkko Multanen: chief executive and director of Accanto Systems vendors who mostly focus on data collection and reporting but who claim that they do analytics. Probe vendors are protocol experts and they do not necessarily understand the processes of CSPs and how they work.

They are not able to do thorough analysis or benchmarking across lots of KPIs or key quality indicators (KQIs). In contrast, what we are providing is a priority list of actions and that is a big difference. For example, if we see that a particular area is used very heavily by a VIP group we are able to provide a CSP with that data so they can react quickly and accurately.

VP: How do you plan to develop Accanto? What will drive the company’s future success?

JM: Our real-time business analytics platform is flexible enough to perform sophisticated analysis cost effectively. Our key approach is to provide QoE optimisation assistance and this is being increasingly demanded by CSPs.

Early adopters are giving us great feedback, so our goal is to be the leading real-time business analytics vendor in the market. The core thing about real-time business analytics is that you need to be able to correlate data from multiple sources. We are correlating all the data related to the operator business. Today, we’re integrating five to ten data sources but in the future more and more information will need to be analysed. That is when a solution like ours will be business critical.

www.accantosystems.com

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