When was the last time you had to call your water provider or the electric company? Telecom used to be that way. Telephone services were so reliable because, relatively speaking, they were the same as electricity or water services; every customer received the same thing and every customer was hooked up the same way. As long as all the connections were healthy, the telephone service was so reliable as to be effectively invisible. But telecom isn’t like that anymore. As a result, managing the connections is no longer sufficient to ensure a quality customer experience.

Customer Experience Management

Customer experience management is all the rage in telecom operations circles. Service providers frantically are trying to manage customer “touch points” and measure the quality of experience each time a customer is in contact with them. While ensuring the health and performance of the connections is still a critical function of network assurance, there is now so much more for operations personnel to worry about. According to a recent Stratecast survey of service providers, the top business drivers for assurance are monitoring services, reducing manual processes and reducing total cost of ownership. In short, service providers are overwhelmed.

The size and complexity of the network has increased dramatically. In parallel, the volume and variety of services has exploded. Hundreds of new services are being offered for dozens of devices that are no longer restricted to a common access infrastructure. Servers, databases and applications have joined optical switches and routers as critical network elements. Service providers also must now manage traffic from third-party bandwidth and content providers as well as the intelligent devices in customers’ hands and homes. And yet, regardless of the source of a problem, the service provider will be blamed for a failure.

Network Assurance

In this expanded operations environment, a better customer experience requires a better approach to network assurance. Every one of the 23 service providers interviewed by Stratecast for its upcoming report, “It’s Always Been About the Customer – Results of a Stratecast Survey of CSP Network Assurance Strategies,” complained about the variety and complexity of network and service element interfaces. Because the networks, services and customers now are tightly integrated, many unintended consequences could result from modifying an interface. Beyond the cost of implementing and maintaining this myriad of interfaces, there is now a genuine risk that any change to an interface could affect adversely the performance of the network and services.

As an industry, we’ve tried numerous times to define a common interface, but to no avail. Now the problem has ballooned and is pushing service providers to the brink. Even if each vendor releases only an annual update, interface maintenance is a daunting and expensive task. Vendors will never manage a competitor’s device as well as they manage their own, so the solution has to be dictated by the service providers.

Network Management

The problem is that no network equipment purchasing decision has ever been made based on network management. But service providers can change that. If a hardware vendor does not implement the specified management interface or map data into the provider’s common information model, they lose. Network equipment vendors don’t make a lot of money selling management software, but the risk of losing a hardware sale surely would encourage them to change their ways.

The real measure of the customer experience is whether the service works. The best way for service providers to continue their tradition of reliable, available service is to solve the problems that are preventing operations personnel from managing it — starting with the interfaces.

Nancee Ruzicka is a senior research analyst for Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivan. She focuses on monitoring and analyzing emerging trends, technologies and market behavior in the global OSS/BSS industry with emphasis on network-facing operations. She can be reached at nruzicka@stratecast.com.