Customer Service Assurance (CSA)

There is perhaps nothing more frustrating to customers than discovering that the service they’ve paid for doesn’t provide the level of quality they expect. There’s a long list of potential issues – in the network, with third parties or even with the subscriber’s device - that can negatively impact service quality.  But, despite the complexity, understanding the customer experience is absolutely critical to long-term business success. To meet that goal, operators must aggregate data from a myriad of sources and systems. Customer service assurance (CSA) is an evolving business and operations function which does just that.

CSA is the process of collecting customer usage information from all practical sources as close to the customer as possible: the subscriber plane (mobile devices and endpoints), the network plane (elements, nodes, systems, and management databases), and the control plane (core network signaling equipment). A CSA solution enables operators to use this data to gain deep insight into customer behavior and correlate service quality with service uptake and usage.

An effective CSA strategy requires the aggregation and correlation of millions of continuously generated customer-usage transaction records that must be enriched constantly with information from other systems. CSA enables operators to understand what service combination customers really use as well what they may want in the future.  And, operators can employ the subscriber-focused data to inform internal operations such as service planning, network planning, partner relationship management, billing and strategic marketing.

Implementing a CSA Strategy

The first step in defining any CSA strategy is to determine what network data is available. Given the high cost of monitoring all of the traffic, the service provider should be selective in the data gathering process, focusing only on the highest-value traffic. In order to measure a customer’s experience with a specific service, the service provider (SP) must define a range of parameters that gives them the ability to flag negative experiences. Once the data gathering process has been established, the next step is to filter and assemble the data into building blocks of actionable information.

Operators then can construct data tables and key performance indicators (KPIs) with the information that demonstrates on an individual or aggregate level how the network and services traversing it are performing.  This approach allows operators to understand the performance of the service for the entire subscriber base as well as usage conditions for