Quality of Experience Drives Mobile Content

If you have ever downloaded a video clip or music file to your cell phone and been dissatisfied, you’re not alone. Zandan’s 2005 study of live transactions reported that more than 20 percent of mobile multimedia transactions never complete. A 2005 survey commissioned by Olista reported that only 12 percent of customers profess to be completely satisfied with the mobile online experience, while 64 percent confessed that they would give up trying after one or two unsuccessful attempts. Wireless carriers are betting their business that users will adopt and pay for content services. They recognize that they must improve their customers’ experience to succeed. Failing to do so, they risk losing not only their customers’ content business, but their voice business as well. What needs to be understood better is how assurance of the consumer’s experience becomes an ongoing part of all content offerings. The Customer Experience Is Vulnerable Content quality problems arise throughout consumers’ “purchase” and “use” value chains, and they are not easily solved. Many issues originate with the handset. U.S. carriers support hundreds of different models from multiple manufacturers. Each one has a limited lifespan and must move through the testing process and hit the market before demand for it has peaked. The rate of device change—and the range of different hardware and software upgrades within a product line—dissuade a carrier from testing extensively how each variation works with its network or services. Many of the most popular handsets are also the most complex, and each must be updated regularly to ensure that its software contains the latest fixes. Some updates are “pushed” over the network, but many require that the consumer access a web site, download a patch to a PC, and then transfer the patch to the handset. Many users simply don’t bother. Because content services are expanding at a logarithmic rate, carriers don’t have time to test each one with each handset. Therefore, they can’t ensure that they can deliver each service to consumers as intended every time. Even if they had time for such testing, it would be labor-intensive and expensive. What’s more, an increasing number of content services are coming from third parties, so carriers don’t necessarily control them directly. The services or content may be stored and delivered from outside of the carrier’s network, with limited visibility and control. Yet these services operate in a highly complex and volatile technical environment with many interdependencies among various networks, systems and devices. These complexities and interdependencies must be managed better and monitored actively if mobile content is going to realize its market potential in the United States. What’s at Risk According to a 2006 CTIA report, data and content services in the United States grow by 70 percent each year. They now account for more than 13 percent of revenue and a greater percentage of profits for major wireless providers. Note, however, that data and content services account for more than 20 percent of the average European carrier’s revenue, and more than 30 percent of the average Asian carrier’s revenue. Assuming the U.S. mobile market will follow the European and Asian markets, as it typically does, $1 billion in revenue is at risk for U.S. mobile operators if they don’t get the content customer experience right (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Risk Factors and Economic Impact of Mobile Transaction Failure Combating Failure Carriers have begun to implement solutions for monitoring and resolving failed content transactions and other customer experience issues. Unfortunately, these solutions are often fragmented and tend to focus on one element of the value chain, a single business unit, or a single department. The result is a series of partial fixes that do not solve consumers’ problems. For example, active probes are used to test the end user’s experience. They will simulate a consumer using a specific handset to access a service at a defined time. The probe collects data that is later analyzed to determine quality of content, timely receipt, accuracy and completeness. This information is then used to determine the root causes of network, device and content-related issues and presumably to drive corrective action plans. Typically, however, it is not correlated with real customer experiences. Even though a carrier may be working to address such problems, however, it is doing so without understanding that consumers at the same time are reacting to the unsatisfactory service. Consumers aren’t aware that their frustrations are being addressed, and many may stop using a service without knowing that their carrier is trying to fix it. The carrier needs to glean from the test results which of its customers were using the service when it failed, and which had an unsatisfactory experience. It needs to ensure that its most valuable customers are aware that it is on top of the problem. A movement is growing within carriers to improve by adopting end-to-end solutions that address problems from the consumer perspective. These may solve both user satisfaction problems as well as the carriers’ internal audit and control problems. The most promising approaches combine active network probes, business analytics and existing carrier systems under a controlling framework of value chain optimization (VCO) that focuses on improving the customer’s quality of experience (QoE). Driving Quality Through VCO VCO programs have recently entered the communications services market and are critical to addressing and resolving QoE challenges in mobile content. VCO arose out of the quality movement and has been used successfully in the manufacturing industry. Toyota adopted it as a means to produce cars that satisfy consumers’ needs in terms of price and quality. This was achieved successfully and increased Toyota’s profit margins per car. The trick involves solving two value chain problems simultaneously. Carriers must improve customers’ experience with the “purchase” (order through fulfillment and cash) and “use” (switch to billed) processes, while driving operational waste out of them. Figure 2: Components of a VCO Program Telecommunications VCO programs typically involve, at the least, the components shown in Figure 2. Some will be internal to a carrier, but many will be external. Corrective actions in each step must be addressed with the dual goals of improving the customer’s end-to-end experience, while improving the profitability of all players in the value chain. The key ingredients for a wireless carrier’s QoE program appear in Figure 3. Figure 3: Wireless Carrier QoE Program Example Two of the key elements of the QoE architecture are active and passive probes used for testing. Active probes are programmed to simulate end users’ experiences fully. They simulate specific handsets to access selected content services. The network only sees the probes as familiar handsets and communicates with them as though they belonged to customers. The probes therefore experience exactly what a user experiences in accessing a service: how it displays on the handset, time needed to refresh pages, the quality of the content, and the completeness of the transaction. Active probes constantly test the network and services throughout the day, recording dozens of variables for each call and transmitting this information to an analytical engine. Passive probes—also known as “sniffers”—are plugged directly into the network data stream and can be configured to monitor numerous operating parameters. An analytical engine parses and correlates data the probe generates with data from other OSS and BSS systems to identify trends as well as at-risk handsets, services and customers. This business intelligence is used to identify customer dissatisfaction and churn risk, as well as carrier and content provider financial risks. The information that probes generate is analyzed under a controlling VCO framework. The VCO process identifies and prioritizes programs that must be developed, executed and monitored to improve service to the highest value customers; to reduce customer frustration and churn; to identify up-sell opportunities with the highest value customers; and to reduce actual or potential revenue leakage and excess costs. Evaluating and Improving QoE Carriers can use a four-step method (Figure 4) to implement a continuous process for measuring, responding to and improving QoE for customers. Its purpose is to improve how often a carrier delivers content to its customers at a high quality level that drives satisfaction and encourages future purchases. The critical factor is to look at the business from the outside in, from the consumer’s perspective, and to simulate and measure that experience as precisely as possible. Once the carrier identifies problems, it can prioritize them by economic impact and their effect on high-value customers. Figure 4: Evaluating and Improving Quality of Experience Customer Experience Assessment A baseline customer experience assessment is the first stage. It can be completed within weeks and can provide tremendous insight into a carrier’s most compelling risk areas. The initial assessments typically include repetitively testing a subset of a carrier’s handsets accessing a targeted set of content services in a given market for a concentrated period. This information is used to establish an empirical snapshot of quality and delivery from the consumer’s perspective. It also allows a carrier, without further analysis, to identify critical problems that must be addressed. Customer Experience Monitoring Findings from the customer experience assessment will help shape customer experience monitoring. This second stage increases the number of markets tested and probes deployed. It also increases the number of handsets tested, operating at multiple frequencies. Customer experience monitoring allows carriers to derive a more complete and statistically valid set of analytics than is possible with the more limited testing in the first stage. Carriers begin correlating data collected by active probes with that collected by passive probes. The results are analyzed within the context of the VCO framework. This in turn helps to identify and prioritize programs that must be developed, executed and monitored to improve the customer’s experience consistently. Customer Experience Analysis In the third phase, customer experience analysis links analytical results with external and carrier data stores to better assess the carrier’s risk of customer churn. It also provides a roadmap for improving customer satisfaction and reducing churn. In this stage, carriers link probe-generated data with OSS, BSS and demographic data to identify which of its highest value customers might be experiencing QoE issues. Carriers also begin to have sufficient data and correlating statistics to forecast the likelihood of future revenue losses and their impact on the bottom line. These forecasts can help to prioritize corrective action plans and programs. The linkage to high-value customers is critical, because VCO corrective action steps are designed to address problems as experienced by the core customers. They are the ones who have the greatest potential to impact a carrier’s profitability. If these customers are dissatisfied, they are likely to stop buying some or all content services. Customer Experience Improvement The final stage is used to evaluate the changes implemented in earlier stages. It is an ongoing effort that becomes central to how a carrier thinks about and conducts its business. Carriers will be able to determine whether the programs delivered the desired QoE to end users and to identify the resulting financial gain to the carrier. If results fall short, they can again analyze this information within the context of the VCO and tune their corrective action plans, or launch new ones that will again be analyzed for effectiveness. Cooperation Is Necessary While the wireless network tends to bear the brunt of blame for poor subscriber experiences, the puzzle is more complex than it first appears. The root cause of problems can just as easily be found in a carrier’s backbone network, a customer’s handset, a component of the service delivery platform, a third-party supplier’s environment or even the content itself. Causes and solutions will change constantly, which means that ensuring QoE is an ongoing need. The quality and reliability of mobile content services will not be improved using traditional approaches. What will be required is cooperation among carriers, handset manufactures, content providers, MVNOs, third-party hosts and the other players who stand to benefit from mobile content’s success. The QoE methodology is just one important aspect of the bigger content picture.

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