Quality-based Services (cont'd)

There's More to the Customer Experience than the Network

Even if we can gain a near perfect understanding of the network's performance and the event-by-event customer experience, we still aren't done. The remaining stumbling blocks to earning that high margin, QoS-based revenue cannot be solved by investing in network technology or software applications. New, carefully planned advertising campaigns can go terribly wrong if the promise of high quality service is broken by a poorly designed self-service web site; an endless IVR loop; a service representative unprepared to handle the customer's query efficiently; or an invoice that is late or apparently inaccurate.

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Under the pressure of fast time to market in the face of enormous competition, it is tempting to focus on making technology work while skipping over the end-to-end design of the new service and its launch. Thorough new product planning is critical to ensuring a positive customer experience - one that builds loyalty, referrals and happy payment of premium prices for premium services.

The Pragmatic New Product Introduction Plan

Here's how to underpin that great QoS service portfolio with the corporate wide support it needs to achieve your business objectives - as quickly as possibly and as painlessly as possible: The Pragmatic New Product Introduction (NPI) Plan.

Key elements of The Pragmatic NPI include:

1. Identify all affected groups early and invite them to participate. Although you may be quite convinced that the Billing Team will always be too slow and too expensive, you might be surprised at how creative they can be in helping you achieve your goals in non-standard ways - if only you asked them at the Concept stage!
2. Have templates developed that enable everyone to race through the logical gates we have talked about in previous issues. Note: each Phase is a "go or no go" gate. You keep moving on to the next phase only if the analysis suggests that the result meets your corporate "go" objectives of cost, time and profit.
1. Concept Phase: The "why should we do something?" analysis of demand, internal capability and competitive offerings.
2. Feasibility Phase: The "something can be done and this is what it looks like" high level description of the offering. This also includes addressing possible pricing and estimated market share. Within this phase it is also necessary to examine the costs to acquire, launch and maintain the service by understanding the end-to-end business process changes, training requirements, OSS impacts and options, reliability of the technology, and advertising and web site changes.
3. Definition Phase: The "here is what we are going to do" with the details filled in. These include procurement schedules, costs, prices, organization and OSS impacts, vendor contracts in place, launch plans built and funded, and whether all affected personnel are ready to perform their roles.
4. Implementation Phase: The "do it" stage, preferably with a limited or "soft" launch to ensure you can catch any unforeseen issues in a controlled environment. This is a great time to step back and walk through the whole process and play customer. Logically test if everything is in place to go from request to delivery; activation to billing; and complaint to resolution. It is surprising what little - or sometimes huge - issues surface as a result of this exercise.
5. Monitor Phase: The "how are we doing?" stage. This should assess the actual performance of people, processes, systems, costs and profits against objectives.
3. Ensure that everyone is aware of the NPI process and how they can affect the profitability of each product being considered, and of the company as a whole. With everyone pulling in precisely the same direction, you get the total synergy available and the customer gets the best possible total QoS experience.

Quality of Service may just be the offering that creates the high value, high margin product service providers are searching for. The Pragmatic NPI approach can help ensure that you have covered all of the necessary bases to deliver not just network QoS, but QoS throughout the entire customer experience.

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