Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 5

	This Month's Issue:
	Keeping Promises

Commitments to Customers
in a World of Competition

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Chart 1 below shows the clear progression of end-user commitment, with service providers offering increasing rigorous SLAs.

While the road to competition has involved customer dissatisfaction and confusion, a benefit-cost analysis of the overall situation would show that end-users are in a better position than they were before competitive

Chart1:
Commitment to Customers: The Evolution of Metro Ethernet SLAs

So, Where Is It Going?

Commitment to customers will play an increasingly important role in the evolving and increasingly competitive communications industry. Tearing down the walls of monopolies and laying the road for competitive entry by permitting a rush of new service providers to enter the telecom realm has led to many of the customer benefits foretold by economists and policy-makers, including more efficient pricing, increased innovation and enhanced choices. Service quality and customer commitment have at times taken a backseat to other business objectives during the early stages of telecom competition, particularly as competitors’ service offerings entered the “switched” service arena and became increasingly complex. Operating a telecom network is not, as many found, a simple proposition.

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

Customers have climbed up the learning curve and will increasingly be holding carriers’ feet to the commitment fire. Tools are being demanded and developed that will permit end-users to actively monitor the quality of service they receive and then act on the information they receive. Ultimately, customers won’t have to take the carriers’ word when it comes to service commitments. Instead customers will be able to decide for themselves if commitments are being lived up to and “vote with their wallets” to hold carriers accountable.

1 See NPRG’s GIG-E/MAN Report™ (2001)

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