Accanto Systems and the Customer-Driven Strategy
As operators and service providers try to evolve into digital lifestyle providers, the quality of customer service is going to become more important that it ever was under the traditional data and voice delivery paradigm. Oracle recently released a customer satisfaction survey conducted by Coleman Parkes which tellingly reveals that the primary reason customers say they don't switch operators is they think that their competitors' services are no better than those they already get. A measly 9 percent of respondents said they were currently happy with the service they receive. Now is the time for operators to invest in meeting their customers' expectations.
Collecting data surrounding customer interaction with the network isn't really enough anymore. That data must be interpreted and presented in a way that provides actionable business intelligence (BI) to the right decision-makers in real time. With processing power of 300,000 events per second, per core and the ability to handle a multi-vendor, converged environment, Accanto Systems' iCEM platform empowers the entire CSP management team to make decisions based on the customer's actual experience. While the network operations or OSS director is typically the owner of these types of solutions within the CSP, the clarity of having a simple 1-5 (with 5 being the highest score, based on real-time data), lends itself to easily disseminate the information across all aspects of the business—from the IT shop focused on network performance to the marketing team focused on KPIs.
“The owner has use cases presented to him or her, which then provides a thorough analysis for top management,” Multanen adds. “It lets them (CSPs) make decisions in a very pragmatic way—based on the current states of the customers. When you are happy, the index is high.”
The real-time QoE data reporting also reveals which network assets impact the largest number of customers. For instance, how many of the people on your network right this second have QoE index ranking of less than 3.5? According to Accanto's experience, those people are using less services: 30 percent less call time for mobile networks. That doesn't amount to much for your small-time customers, but 30 percent less call time for a large enterprise customer can potentially mean tens of thousands to the bottom line.
“You need to measure the QoE of each customer,” Multanen adds. “We provide a simulation to allow operators to adopt a QoE-driven strategy. Not all customers require the same quality of experience.”
This data can direct everything from capacity allocation and coverage to future planning for investment in assets that serve the most important customers. Armed with real-time iCEM scores, CSP managers can answer all-too-important questions including the following: How much revenue have you lost? How many of your customers are likely to churn? How much revenue or how many customers are you willing to lose? On which calls are we losing most of the money? Which are your most under-used services?
The answers to those questions create a mind shift within the CSP toward a QoE-, customer-driven operation from the NOC to the Marketing department, and provides everyone on the team with a common tool for communicating what is essentially the only thing that matters: are your assets being used to serve the highest ARPU customers at all times? Since its launch last year, there have been several successful deployments of the Accanto Systems iCEM solution. One large European operator has recently signed on to adopt the platform in the coming months. Accanto Systems wants you to re-imagine the way you interact with your customers. With each deployment, and each new operator that adopts the iCEM platform, the shift in thinking toward customer service assurance and smart QoE management is starting to take hold.
