Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 2

	This Month's Issue:
	Time for a Check Up

QoS and Customer Satisfaction

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Various objective as well as subjective methods may be used by the telecommunication service providers to periodically assess their quality of service. Increasingly, most telecom regulators are also devising benchmarks for quality of service expected from telcos and are regularly keeping tabs on conformance with these benchmarks. Some of the objective methods that may be used for measuring quality of service include:

Parameter	Sub-parameter for measurement
Network Fault related parameters	1. Fault Incidence rate 2. Mean Time to repair 3. Network availability
Network reliability	1. Call set-up success rate (within own network) 2. Service Access Delay 3. Signal strength and voice quality 4. Call Drop rate 5. % connections with good voice quality
Billing related parameters	1. Billing complaints per 100 bills issued 2. Period of billing complaint resolution 3. Period of refund to customers

"Another means to measure quality of service is by measuring customer satisfaction with the services being provided by the telco."

The perception-to-expectation gap (measure of satisfaction level) will narrow only when the rate of growth of perceived service is higher than the rate of growth of expected service. It, therefore veers around to the fact that both expected & perceived satisfaction levels are dependent on three critical aspects:

Actual quality of service delivered by company
Perceived quality of service delivered by competitors in this market
Perceived quality of service delivered in other markets (hearsay)

This brings us to the need for a satisfaction measure that benchmarks against the competition. At one level, a comparison of the perceived satisfaction of the two services can indicate the degree of superiority of one over the other. At another level, it can indicate the gap from the expectation.

How to measure satisfaction
Any satisfaction measurement exercise should have a bench marking component. The benchmark can be to the best known competitor or the closest competitor.
At the overall level, the following measures are indicators of gap between perceived & expected quality:

(a) Satisfaction with service delivered by the best/closest competitor and by the company

(b) Likelihood of recommending to others if asked for an opinion (Company & closest competitor)

The above measure for quality of service measurement may be taken from the MSC and through live tests such as drive tests on the telcos network.

Another means to measure quality of service is by measuring customer satisfaction with the services being provided by the telco. Satisfaction studies aim to measure the quality of service as perceived by the customer and relate this to his/her expectations. The distance between expectation & perception of service is an indicator of dissatisfaction level (a measure of satisfaction). These measures come in handy when tracking satisfaction over an extended period of time as indicated in the graphs below (Table A) :

(c) Likelihood of utilizing the service again if had an option to choose once more (Company & closest competitor)

Each of these is a measure of satisfaction level with varying degree of rigor. Thus, measure (b) & (c) are more stringent than measure (a) and measure (c) is more stringent than measure (b).

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Table A

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