At this point, effective CRM would seem to be starting to look like traditional data center spaghetti. Before, however, you conclude that your future involves a repeat of your complex legacy infrastructure past. The good news is that isn’t true (or at least doesn’t have to be). Again, the question to ask is why?

If we jump back a couple of paragraphs, we see that Middleware, ETL, ESB and mediation are all fundamentally data management and integration technologies. How they are applied, how their individual functional strengths are exploited and which use cases they address may differ from each other but the core reality is that effective data technology should be able to operate ‘horizontally’ as a direct or indirect CRM feeder engine, across all the use cases above and others. To underline the point, there’s no inherent reason why a mediation system has to be an antecedent to billing or an ETL application has to be configured to simply extract, transfer and load. At least, theoretically, that’s the case.

What about the reality? What does a ‘horizontal CRM data management application’ look like? Does such a beast exist?  Thankfully, it does. We can see this by examining the following three use cases, all of which massively impact the customer experience and the service providers relationship with them; and all of which are discharged using the same technology platform. Mediation. This can be the basis of providing real, proactive CRM.

Use Case 1 - Probe Integration

A Tier 2 CSP in Eastern Europe needed to enable enhanced Customer Experience Management to better relationships on its multi-vendor network.  In the process, it wanted to create new, additional alarms and audit flows. Scoping defined dimensioning requirements at around 450,000 events and the OSS Data Integration needed to be completed in only thirty days.

Data Integration had to act as a generic probe collection layer, thus solving the problem of integration of data from probes into existing CRM tools and unlock a silo of data between network signalling information and its before dedicated application. This was required to enable the CSP’s CRM system to provide multi-vendor reporting, that is to get and present performance data from non-standard networks and probes. In the process, Mediation needed to extract data from 8 network interfaces.

Use Case 2 - Real-Time Service Assurance

A Tier 1 operator in the Americas region needed to monitor its LTE network data sessions to identify performance issues.  Data Integration Meditation was deployed to collect millions of subscribers’ radio and core signaling events and correlate them into end-to-end session records (roughly 100,000 events per blade). The result was a 92 percent data off-load on down-stream monitoring tools/DB.