Are Mobile Operators Really Committed to Customers? (cont'd)

Making the Customer Connection
If the connection between network events and active services can be made, the next step is to tie that information to customers and deliver it to the people who need it. Generally, billing plays a significant role here because "subscriber data that usually ends up at the door of a billing system in CDRs and IPDRs is now a fundamental component of service management," says ADC's Turner. Of course, exposing a billing system or process to external integration adds a whole new level of risk to the equation. Circuit inventory can also be a hinge point between services and customers, but few carriers have enough data consistency among systems to tie a specific circuit identifier in one system to a customer identifier in another.

Presenting Relevant Information to the Right People
Delivering information to the right people can mean anything from creating a detailed web front-end or integrating with CRM applications to installing a whole new application designed to display common information to different groups in relevant ways. Defining what's relevant and what to display is essentially a matter of careful requirements gathering conducted within and among each group. Most service assurance vendors are rolling out dashboard interfaces that can display this information to people in an accessible and flexible way if deployed properly.

What About Service Fulfillment?
All of the activities mentioned thus far only cover network service assurance and CRM. Part of the overall customer experience includes everything from service ordering and provisioning to billing. "I've been involved in a service management survey with operators," says Strong, "and the problems that occur the most are the ones that fault and performance management systems can't detect." The top three problems Agilent's survey identified, according to Strong, involved network configuration, handset configuration, and provisioning issues. Any of these can have a direct impact on a customer's experience, particularly with new services. If a subscriber can't access a service because a handset is configured wrong or the backhaul network can't support the request, it will result in a failure that's simply unacceptable and a lengthy and costly call to the care center.

People hate to change
Even if the technological hurdles are overcome, there are still people to consider. "There's a lot of internal reorganization necessary to get to this mode of customer-centricity," says Moynihan. People resist change, and change creates political struggles that can undermine even the best architectural and project plans. Sharing information means people working inside operators will be looking over each others' shoulders, and that can lead to fear and conflict. Further, it's not simple to retrain people for inter-group communication who are accustomed to working in a defined silo. Anyone that has ever worked as a salesperson or consultant inside a major carrier understands that when people feel vulnerable, they'll do what they must to sandbag projects and protect their fiefdoms. If their jobs do not depend on demonstrating change and improving the way the business operates, they'll have no reason to comply with management's decisions to integrate and re-organize around the customer.

What Operators are and aren't Doing Today
A few operators, including AT&T Wireless, Orange and Vodafone Ireland have installed basic service management systems successfully from Watchmark-Comnitel, ADC and an Agilent partner, respectively. Many others have issued RFIs or RFPs for systems that will provide some of the infrastructure for customer-centric service management. According to ADC's Turner, operators are retooling their performance management systems to derive data that is more relevant to the customer experience than the network-centric data collected today. "They've done this performance management refresh so they can move to service management next year," says Turner. "They're not yet implementing service management on a wide scale, though they are all talking about it," he says.

Another concept mobile operators appear to embrace is that of the service operations center (SOC). "The SOC looks after the service pipe and the revenue it generates," explains Concord's Schmidtke. The SOC tries to determine not only which network events affect the most customers, but also the most revenue. From there, the operator can devote resources to fixing the most costly problems first. Generally this means corporate customers will receive priority service, but an operator cannot be faulted for caring for its biggest customers first. All of the experts interviewed for this story also agreed that new data users - including teens who are driving download traffic - are important to operators that want to make sure they receive their downloads in a timely fashion so they'll continue to come back for more.

It's important to note that just because an operator claims to have a SOC today does not mean it has all of the visibility into the customer experience it really needs. If an operator will sell an empty SLA, it can just as easily change the 'N' in NOC to an 'S'. In the end, the SOC may still focus on the network, but require more emails and phone calls to people on the customer-facing side of the organization to follow up on what the NOC discovers. It's a decent first step, but ultimately a temporary solution that won't meet corporate customers' real needs.

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