By Horacio Miranda De Oliveira, Tekelec

Service provider executives, marketing teams, and account managers are concerned with a growing number of customer-focused service quality and availability issues. Their concerns are poorly addressed with the tools traditionally used to monitor network operations, and the challenges will only grow more complex as data traffic continues to exponentially grow.

A proactive approach, however, is Customer Experience Management (CEM), which industry analyst firm Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivan, says is gaining favor as service providers increase their understanding of the relationship between customer perception of service quality and the longer-term business requirements for customer retention and managing brand loyalty.

Stratecast defines CEM as the business strategy for increasing service provider awareness and understanding of how customers perceive the level of service they receive every time they have an “experience” with the company¹ . This comes from multiple

dimensions and can be broadly defined within two distinct business practices: Customer-Centric Quality of Experience and Quality of Service.

Customer-Centric Quality of Experience is the “big picture” focus of CEM. This encompasses whenever a customer touches a service provider, such as contacting support with a problem, buying a new handset at the retail store, paying a bill, checking an account balance or upgrading service options.

Customer-Centric Quality of Service, also known as Customer Service Assurance (CSA), delivers a continuous measure of service quality, understanding both when a customer is experiencing levels of service quality as promised and when quality is below expectations. CSA can concentrate on an individual, corporate group, demographic region within a large enterprise, or a geographic area.

According to Stratecast, Customer Service Assurance is the process of collecting customer usage information from all practical sources as close to the customer as possible: the subscriber plane (mobile devices and endpoints), the network plane (elements,

While a CSA-based business strategy is difficult, Stratecast believes it brings significant rewards through increased awareness of what service combinations customers really use, along with an indication of what they may want in the future. This enables service to more efficiently address internal operations needs involving service planning, network planning, partner relationship management, billing and strategic marketing.

The following examples represent several real-world customer-centric solution implementations our service provider customers have achieved.

Optimizing Mobile Web Access Experience
Subscribers expect the same high speed Internet experience on a mobile device at a reasonable cost as they receive in a fixed-line environment. They want to access information quickly and accurately for business and personal needs. Because they are mobile, customers visit different websites due to content and geographic relevance. Further, these sites need to be easily accessible by mobile devices to provide a positive customer experience.