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application. Once again, reputation is impacted and customers are put off experimenting with new services in the future.
Both of these issues also highlight one of the central problems with historic service assurance or performance management strategies. Information important to the well-being of the company as a commercial whole often remained trapped in departmental or technology silos. It was far often simpler to shift blame, rather than collectively problem-solve across different boundaries and share insights, irrespective of whether the input came from billing, financial planning, business development, engineering, operations or CRM.
While the industry is now well advanced in addressing these issues, first by accepting that these problems exist and then by developing suitable tools and systems to address them, the next generation network environment – especially in its business services incarnation – is set to increase the pressure by a few more notches.
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"...history and experience show us that it’s usually easiest to blame the communications service provider." |
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Finally, they’re also going to have to deal with far more complexity in the back office areas of BSS and OSS, especially where content and applications may be being sourced from a third party, or link straight in the business customer’s own IT systems. Underpinning all these applications is a continuing requirement for service assurance systems to work seamlessly across both IP and circuit-switched technologies, mirroring the interworking of the communications traffic itself. While any chain is only as strong as its weakest link, history and experience show us that it’s usually easiest to blame the communications service provider.
In response, service providers need to be able to balance the operational benefits of having a common platform, gathering and integrating service data from many different sources, with the flexibility and cost-efficiency of a modular approach to provide support and specific services as and when required.
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Delivering quality:
It’s rare for a customer’s perception of service quality to be based on just one or two simple binary opposites – such as the phone works or it doesn’t. Instead, our ‘gut’ feelings of quality are actually based on numerous small, incremental and largely unconscious perceptions, which, in traditional telecommunications could range from a grubby and bad-tempered engineer turning up on the doorstep to a minor, but recurring fault on a handset. In this rapidly receding world of fairly simple, basic voice and data connectivity services, there were only a limited number of things that could go wrong…. and the future’s looking far different.
Consider a typical scenario where triple or quad-play operator starts to target the SME market. In their fixed line infrastructure, they have their DSL network to support – one which, in many cases, will be coexisting with the infrastructures of incumbents or other service providers.. They may also be using DSL connections as backhaul out to WiFi hotspots, or have peering arrangements with other hotspot owners to provide nomadic wireless access to their business customers.
In the cellular space, they may have their own radio infrastructure to support, or, alternatively, may have partnered with an existing cellular operator to buy capacity and act as an MVNO. Additionally, it is also likely that they have their own range of handsets and mobile devices, each of which adds yet another variable to the consistency element of overall service quality.
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Such a platform must possess particular characteristics. It must be equipped with the appropriate network and system interfaces to cope with today’s multi-vendor environment, have the ability to display job-function specific service quality information to appropriate management dashboards and systems. Additionally, it needs to be supported by a methodology powerful enough to help marketing, business development and engineering staff to mode and define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Key Quality Indicators (KQIs) and commercial Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Supporting this, the service provider also requires prepackaged modules capable of supporting particular services in the shortest timeframes if time to market is to be minimized. Examples of these service and application-specific packages should certainly include support for BlackBerry, i-mode, VoIP, and enterprise-grade GPRS, for a start.
If business customers are to truly benefit from all the new services and applications that are now coming, they must be persuaded that their service providers have the tools and techniques in place to support them on their journeys towards greater competitiveness and efficiency. Without the correct emphasis on service quality assurance, then all the marketing and advertising in the world won’t change a business customer’s perception that is based on real experience.
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