Customer experience is a core focus for businesses across the whole spectrum of the telecommunications industry and communications service providers (CSPs) are no different. As competition in the CSP space has increased, so too has the importance of good customer experience management (CEM). It’s the key differentiator on which SLAs are measured, reputations are built and customers are won and retained.

Agility and efficiency in provisioning new services while assuring excellent user experience (location, device, and network agnostic) are the factors that set one provider apart from another. The network game is all about the quality of the experience and, ultimately, it’s the only thing that the end user sees. They don’t see or care much about the infrastructure or the latency and loss itself, but they do see the impact of latency, loss and poor network performance on their applications. With that being the case, it should come as no surprise that CSPs are refocusing their efforts on their CEM strategies to better understand how individual customers use their services – and then find new ways to improve the experience.

In the CSP context, CEM covers a broad range of customer touch points, incorporating network traffic and performance, billing and marketing functions, and direct customer interviews – whatever the interaction, it is covered by CEM.

The net result is a complex and fragmented beast composed of different systems, solutions, processes and approaches to managing the customer experience. We still see there are hundreds of different solutions and tens of different definitions for CEM and it’s not hard for CSPs to lose their way or for vendors to inadequately explain their capabilities. The volume of data and complexity of analytics now span over several domains, not all of which can be covered by a single system. Simply put, there’s no single solution to address all of the challenges presented by achieving effective CEM, and the result is a fragmented approach.

As a company, we are focused on a subset of CEM: end-to-end service quality of experience. That’s because we only cover part of it, where we analyse customer experience correlated with service, the transport network and the application servers participating in delivering the service.

A Changing Landscape

Fundamentally, CSPs need to monitor three different parts of service delivery to maintain quality of service and ensure a good customer experience: at the basic connectivity level where you test the underlying transport: the service (both control and media) and the application server infrastructure that is part of the service. Importantly, they need to collate this information proactively to identify issues in a timely fashion. Many CSPs lack the capabilities to harvest enough information from there systems to be able to make a meaningful difference to performance – and that is before we consider ongoing changes in the network that make this job a whole lot more difficult.

Networks are fast evolving, becoming increasingly software-centric, more automated, more virtualized and, as a result, much more complex. Static network architectures, technologies and rigid OSS/BSS platforms of the past are being incrementally replaced with networks, services and OSS/BSS platforms that can adapt to requirements of new services that are more prone to peaks in bandwidth demand and more suitable to provide adequate service quality for applications that require high performance, such as video and voice over LTE (VoLTE). To manage the experience in, for example, VoLTE in these complex environments you need to understand and analyse the control and user plane data. It’s also important to tap into the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) performance to understand what the quality indicators for the voice are and what experience has been provided.

It’s a network complexity issue but also a service management and visibility one which, when combined, make it difficult for network operators to maintain service quality and the customer experience. Network operators have to move from a relatively homogeneous environment consisting of equipment from a single vendor, to a situation where they have to manage and deploy different vendors and cell types – often in very dense geographical areas. These different options force operators to use different backhaul options and while they provide new levels of flexibility and capability, they also add new layers to the overall ecosystem.

Operators receive a lot of information from a wide variety of sources – but even then only have a partial view of the customer experience. This blind spot will only increase as the network becomes more software-defined and virtualized, which will create new layers in which vulnerabilities can hide.

Customers are no longer just dependent on one service or dependent on one provider, and might touch 100’s of different services over the course of a single day. Having visibility over what the user is experiencing is therefore a major challenge. While CSPs have visibility over certain parts of the customer experience, the whole picture is often lacking. Traditional network management systems contain a lot of data on traffic and use it to understand the experience of users, but these are typically disconnected systems used by network engineers. Typical probe-based analytics systems cover only the core network, leaving radio, backhaul, and transmission network performance as a mystery. Other user groups, meanwhile, such as those in the billing department or in contact centres, have no access to them.