CSPs need to deliver insight into individual and group customer service quality, minimising operational expenses, accelerating problem resolution and optimising the customer experience, writes Graham Kunz.
Most traditional service assurance solutions deployed by both fixed and mobile communications service providers (CSPs) focus on network troubleshooting and surveillance. These tools are primarily used by network operations and engineering staff to identify and resolve network related issues and, while this model has been effective in the past, the time has come for additional capabilities.
product marketing
manager at Empirix
The service assurance segment is evolving: CSPs now require solutions that provide greater levels of visibility not only into the network, but also into the services and vendor devices deployed in the environment. The real change, however, lies in the need for specific insight into the customer base as a means of understanding gaps in service or concentrated problem areas. This knowledge can empower CSPs to enhance their capabilities and reduce churn in addition to forming the foundation for proactive and highly focused marketing campaigns aimed at providing the right service to the right person at the right time.
New services drive differentiated customer focus
CSPs are also changing how they view and manage their customers. Previously, the services offered to each customer were limited. This was true even for mobile service providers: Just a short time ago, the services available to their customers did not extend beyond voice and SMS.
The explosion in mobile broadband and data, along with the availability of smartphones and other devices, has changed all that. Customers now access a multitude of services each day: checking email, surfing the web, using video communications, downloading third-party applications for almost everything, and of course, engaging through a plethora of social media applications.
Along with the introduction of each new service or application, the underlying network transport and technology now permit quality of service (QoS) to be determined and implemented on a per-customer basis. With that, many of the world’s leading mobile service providers are now competing more on service quality than usage amounts. For example, a customer can select a tariff or plan based on the data service speed – both download and upload – they require. The tariff is also linked with consumption, meaning a customer may have their speed downgraded or reduced if they consume more than their allocated data volume.
The introduction of such tariffs results in a number of revenue growth initiatives for service providers, which in turn requires a shift in the focus of today’s service assurance solutions. These solutions need to evolve to address key aspects of customer care in order to better manage the customer base on both an individual and a group basis.
Legacy problem resolution
Traditionally, the vast majority of customer care issues would eventually find their way to Tier 2 or Tier 3 network operations and engineering teams before resolution. However, with the volume of issues dramatically increasing due to growth in available data services and proliferation of mobile device users, it will be difficult to sustain this model and resolve issues in a timely manner. In most cases, there may be multiple touch points involved in resolving a customer’s issue as it escalates through the CSP in a series of steps, detailed below:
Step 1 – When the call is placed or made by the customer, the first responder is usually someone from customer care who has little or no technical knowledge. This person is normally restricted to traditional CRM solutions and customer billing information.
Step 2 usually involves the customer care operator passing the issue to technical support. This department usually has access to some form of service performance tool or application, but, again, has limited technical knowledge and so is often unable to quantify, never mind resolve, any issue.
As a result, a given issue may well involve Step 3, where technical support engages the customer again in order to better understand the nature of the issue. Even then, it is highly likely that technical support will have to then pass a large number of calls and issues to network operations and engineering for investigation and resolution, which is Step 4.
Accelerate problem resolution
Deploying an effective and intuitive customer experience solution in a customer service environment allows technical support or non-expert staff to troubleshoot basic customer-affecting problems, enabling them to resolve a higher percentage of customer issues and deliver better overall service from the customer perspective. This also results in an overall reduction in issue mean time to repair (MTTR), an objective of nearly all service providers as it reduces not only the operational expense involved in resolving customer affecting problems (Step 3), but also minimises potential revenue losses as part of a service outage. Furthermore, fewer issues or troubletickets are passed to network operations and engineering (Step 4),
freeing up resources for complex issues such as improving network reliability and service quality.
The Empirix Customer Experience solution is designed for use by a CSP’s technical support staff. It accommodates evolving service provider environments and consists of a scalable platform based on the Empirix System Architecture. The solution supports fast retrieval of individual or customer group information, including analysis of related service experience. Support staff access customer information – including the device type being used as well as actual service experiences at a related location or locations – by entering basic customer details such as a phone number or by selecting a specific customer group. This information is displayed and summarised in a non- technical format, enabling analysis by technical support staff with no knowledge of how each service itself works, never mind the underlying network technology.
Service experience is determined by specific key performance indicators (KPIs) derived directly through each customer’s interaction with both the network and related services they access or use. The KPIs available within the solution target:
- Service Access – Can the customer actually access the network and the required service?
- Service Performance – Once the customer has accessed the network – or, in the case of mobile, physically attached – and is using the service requested, what is their service experience for voice, SMS, MMS, and data?
- Service Handovers – In the case of mobile, can the customer move around the network without service interruption or performance issues?
By arranging the information in such a format, technical support staff can rapidly identify and diagnose customer-affecting problems. More significantly, they are able to determine if the problem is unique to the individual customer raising the issue or related to an issue impacting other customers who are in the same location or using the same service.
The solution also enables the same customer issues to be further analysed by more technical/expert staff by providing in-context drilldown into dedicated troubleshooting tools. As a result, CSPs not only have a more detailed insight into the customer experience, but they also gain accelerated problem resolution.
