Unfortunately, however—whether due to human error, software glitches, or hardware outages—failures happen all the time. Customers, though, aren’t interested in the cause of failures. They just want to know how quickly such failures will be remedied.

An outage in any one service component can color a customer’s view of an entire service. A customer who has purchased a triple-play service, for example, will perceive it as a whole package. But if problems with the fixed network lead to delays in accessing a movie on Netflix, their perception of the service will be average at best, and open the CSP up to the real risk of that weakness being exploited by a competitor. Consumers are notoriously fickle, after all, and will often take their money to the operator that provides the better service.

The next evolutionary step

In an environment in which customers expect operators to react in real time—and are not afraid to voice their dissatisfaction if they don’t—the proactive detection of network issues is essential. Achieving this proactivity requires the comprehensive, real-time analysis of data originating from the network.

CSPs recently began investing in migrating from traditional network operation centers (NOCs), focused on specific network technologies, to service operation centers (SOCs), focused on end-to-end services. Despite successful implementations of the SOC concept, however, telecoms’ IT environments tend still to be organized in silos, each focused on different technologies such as mobile network, fixed network, or IPTV. This siloed approach makes it impossible to monitor customer experience holistically regarding all services in use. And, as the Netflix example illustrates, failure in one service can affect a customer’s perception of an entire package.

The next step in the organizational evolution of CSPs is likely to be the establishment of service excellence centers (SECs), gathering experts from different domains to collect, interpret and efficiently utilize broader information from a range of sources. Doing so will support every interaction a customer has with the network, from service activation through delivery to termination.

This next iteration should also take into account information related to customer segmentation, such as high ARPU customers and heavy roamers, to allow CSPs to prioritize network incidents and their resolution accordingly, and to provide more consistent input that will allow network planning departments to prioritize spending according to expected ROI.

Integrated assurance

Key to achieving these goals is the implementation of a comprehensive assurance platform, a modern OSS/BSS solution that provides an integration point between data coming in from traditional assurance domains such as performance, service quality and fault management, and enriching it with data from BSS domains, such as customer care and CRM.

By correlating data from both network and other OSS/BSS sources, such a data analytics solution can produce a comprehensive real-time analysis that will provide invaluable insight into a customer’s experience of the provided services, including their current location, and early detection of problems accessing basic services such as voice and SMS, OTT services, and others such as VoD.

Not only can this data be used to generate summary reports, enabling CSPs to prioritize network planning, and identify and solve hidden problems on the network, it can also trigger marketing actions such as sending vouchers to compensate for network problems as soon as they arise, or sending information to customers via SMS or an app, thus keeping the customer satisfied.

Together, this integrated assurance approach—supported by an OSS/BSS data analytics solution—gives CSPs the ability to proactively improve customer experience by addressing potential issues in the network, their primary touchpoint, before the customer contacts one of the other, secondary touchpoints to voice their displeasure about the network quality.

Customer experience is one of the main battlefields in the ongoing competition between CSPs and OTTs. The use of real-time data that takes into account the real experience of customers when using a given service provided by their networks will enable CSPs to reclaim important ground.