Pipeline Publishing, Volume 6, Issue 5

	This Month's Issue:
	Managing the End-User Experience

Customer Service Assurance:
The Cornerstone of Customer Satisfaction

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Use Case 2: Real-time Service Monitoring for Business Customers

The Customer’s Perspective

A large corporate account secures a contract with a local service provider for mobile services and corporate email. The enterprise is familiar with the service options but has some concerns about the expected quality of service. Except for feedback from employees, the company has no way of objectively measuring network performance against promised levels of service quality.

The Operator’s Perspective

The operator understands the value of establishing long-term corporate relationships based on network bandwidth, service availability, and service quality. To meet these objectives, the carrier must provide real-time service monitoring—by customer— for a number of operational parameters that will vary from one corporate account to the next.

With the appropriate tracking capabilities in place, the SP can offer each corporate account an individual SLA, tailored to meet the specific requirements of each business. By doing so, the SP can significantly increase its corporate customer base. The SP knows that maximizing its opportunities with enterprise contracts is business critical, since they represent large blocks of subscribers and a reliable revenue source.

Customer-level SLAs on a near real-time basis, accompanied with a view into the performance of the enterprise subscriber base, is fast becoming the norm for this operator. It believes such capabilities help create “sticky relationships” with major customers who now have the option of viewing service performance as a corporate aggregate or at the individual subscriber level.

To demonstrate the service contract, the operator uses its service monitoring and tracking solution to build reportable measures of network performance. The operator also uses this data to proactively measure key metrics to ensure that it will not incur contract performance penalties in case of service level

Operators are looking for the next level of visibility to improve their insight into the subscriber experience.

violations. Reports from this system are shared directly with corporate customers or summarized through other business systems. The metrics in the reports are created by aggregating information points from a multitude of collected network data that generally focuses on three fundamental metrics including:

Efficiency – Voice is provided as a ratio of completed calls over the total number of call attempts; SMS is provided as a number of first delivery attempts (FDA) over the number of confirmed delivery SMS.
Service access response time – This is measured as the delay between a request and response from the Web or an application server providing a service.
Bandwidth utilization – Measured as both uplink and downlink for every Internet protocol detail record (IPDR), which looks at statistics per subscriber and in the aggregate.

Conclusion

A new wave of mobile applications and devices is transforming the way in which people communicate. As end-points become smarter, services more intricate and networks more complex, operators are looking for the next level of visibility to improve their insight into the subscriber experience. The systems they traditionally have relied on to manage network operations do not have the flexibility and granularity to provide the in-depth, real-time data and analysis required to support customer service assurance. To succeed in this dynamic market, operators need to move beyond basic network monitoring solutions to advanced systems capable of overseeing the end-to-end network connectivity and service experience – from the subscriber’s device to the applications they access.

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About Tekelec

Tekelec, a global leader in core multimedia session control, mobile messaging and network intelligence, ensures scalable, secure and highly available communications. The company's market-leading signaling solutions enable the interworking of different network applications, technologies and protocols, providing a smooth transition to next-generation networks. Tekelec has more than 20 offices around the world serving customers in more than 100 countries, with corporate headquarters located near Research Triangle Park in Morrisville, N.C., U.S.A. For more information, please visit www.tekelec.com.

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