Connecting With Your Customers: Linking OSS and BSS Information (Cont'd)

"customer-centric" since many BSS systems provide or support things that are involved in direct or indirect customer interaction. By comparison the OSS have been focused on "the network" or "the services", i.e. an operations team uses these systems to detect and diagnose issues in the service they provide, or the telecoms infrastructure that delivers it. In the past, with limited services and predictable call models, managing the network in itself was sufficient to assure good service quality. However, little awareness or consideration of an individual customer experience was provided via this network-centric OSS approach. As new services have proliferated and network complexity has exploded, the same basic ‘network-centric’ OSS strategy has prevailed until now. As many a NOC manager will attest to, all the lights can still be green but customer complaints continue.

What Winners Will Do in a New Environment
Customer Assurance begins at the network, which is the obvious source for the basic building blocks--- real-time, accurate, and highly granular customer-focused business measures. The ability to measure and manage individual customer transactions and exchanges associated with the contracted service is pivotal.

Implementing Customer Assurance involves a shift in business strategy to refocus on OSS capabilities to support this process. The key to this shift is that the actual measured customer experience must be linked to the traditional view of network and service management. The desired result is a customer aware OSS that provides the Service Provider visibility into the individual customer experience and how it is affected by network performance. This includes the ability to provide:

• Differentiation through objective, customized, and measurable SLA’s which can be targeted to each customer’s situation.
• A proactive and timely view of customer impact associated with network events or outages.

To implement genuine Customer Assurance, it is insufficient to simply take an ‘inferred’ approach from data available in legacy network and service management systems. This approach may give you an indication that end-customers should be able to access the network or service but a much more granular and direct “business measures” approach is required. This would provide both a ‘wide angle’ view combined with the ability to ‘zoom in’ on individual customer groups as required. The major difference in these strategies lies in the data sources feeding the respective OSS/BSS systems. Rather than trying to ‘infer’ the customer experience, leading measurement vendors are utilizing very different data sources to ‘directly measure’ the customer experience.

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