Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 5

	This Month's Issue:
	Keeping Promises

Commitments to Customers
in a World of Competition

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Creating A Customer-centric and Controlled Structure

The telecommunications market, with its numerous complexities, presents challenges for end-users as they seek to make buying decisions. Price is an easily identified and understood factor, but as noted above, it is only one factor. Quality of service (QoS) is a paramount buying criterion, especially when the service being purchased is mission-critical.

Complete information for consumers is essential in enabling the sound functioning of any competitive market. Incomplete information leads to poor, “inefficient” decisions by consumers. Required information includes much more than pricing, and will range from product features and functionality to overall quality. All of this should go into consumers’ calculations in determining which competitor’s product or service to purchase. Without such information, end-users are flying blind.

Work still needs to be done on the customer care and commitment front before the full benefits of competition are realized.

QoS information to end-users are being used by savvy carriers as a key differentiator.

Table 2 identifies some of the necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) conditions that must be met if customers are to be able to hold carriers accountable.

A Case Study: The Evolution of Metro Ethernet SLAs

Metro Ethernet services have seemingly burst on the telecom scene to become one of the fastest growing set of telecommunications services. When New Paradigm Resources Group, Inc. (NPRG) first covered this sector just a half dozen years ago, a formal label hadn’t yet been assigned to it.¹ Today,

Currently, all but the most sophisticated telecom customers lack the requisite tools to discern if their service provider is indeed living up to their verbal commitments. As the market and carriers continue to evolve, customers will demand better information. And, as we have found in our research on other evolving sectors (see our Metro Ethernet discussion below), tools that provide

these services are gaining wide acceptance as bandwidth requirements continue their exponential growth. However, in addition to Metro Ethernet’s functionality, carrier commitment to end-users reflected by service level agreements (SLAs) are helping shore up confidence that this sector and the associated services are real and here to stay.

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