Customer experience provides a means for CSPs to set themselves apart from their rivals, but the task is not straightforward, writes Jarkko Multanen
Competition in the communications industry is intense and CSPs are looking for differentiation. As traditional communication services revenues decline, CSPs look for new revenue streams by focusing on innovative applications, cloud centric strategies, interactive and video centric services, and M2M services. To maximise their revenue opportunity, CSPs look for ways to personalise their service plans around specific consumer activities and behaviours such as video sharing, online gaming or live content streaming, and to promote them accordingly
However, when every CSP has similar networks and services, they can only separate themselves from the pack by offering superior customer experience. The company that manages to do so can be more efficient, more proactive and ultimately more innovative than its competitors.
Legacy CEM solutions suffered from myopic vision and were either too network centric, like the extension of performance management amd assurance solutions, or too front-end facing such as the extension of CRM solutions and business intelligence applications. What these solutions lacked was holistic balance between network performance and the subscriber view of service performance. Therefore, it is no surprise that these solutions failed to successfully connect the dots between network performance measurement and its implication on customer experience. Next generation CEM solutions need to evolve and bridge the gap between network performance and customer experience but also cover five key actions: predict, control, respond, improve and optimise. These activities need to be correlated and managed in real-time, utilising advanced analytics,and align subscriber expectation, network performance and operating capabilities.
Since communications services operate in real-time, the impact on customer experience is more immediate than in other industries. The CSP that best anticipates end-customer requirements, improves responsiveness, provides a more personalised level of service and, and intelligently manages its customer’s experience, should reap the benefits of lower operational costs, increased customer loyalty and higher profitability.
Next gen CEM solutions need to help service providers optimise their network by focusing on the experience of key customer segments and should be QoE (Quality of Experience) driven. QoE monitoring should calculate the quality of experience (QoE) of subscribers, identifying the business impact of the lost revenues and costs that stem from poor service, in order to provide recommendations to improve the QoE and optimise ROI for each customer segment.
QoE driven next gen CEM solutions will play a central role in accurate, realistic and proactive operational planning capabilities, which will not only enable the correct sizing of the future network, but also help service providers to reduce capacity shortfalls, minimise order fallout and increase efficiency by identifying under-utilised network resources. Nextgeneration network planning tools also need to evolve and support adjacent areas that involve revenue generation and assessment of operators’ network profitability. With global economic conditions worsening and service providers struggling to understand the profitability of the network, there is no doubt that a next gen CEM solution is well positioned to play a central role in service provider infrastructure.
