Searching Wide and Deep for the Customer Experience

Mobile X-Ray is an intelligent monitoring and analysis product for diagnosing and managing mobile data services. The reason it addresses CEM so well is it correlates information from the network, the services themselves, from subscribers and devices. It acts as a vertical application that sits on top of the company’s service assurance platform known as TAMS.

Together with Sunrise’s 3Gmaster and NeTracker protocol analyzers, they form the company’s CEM architecture. Since launching Mobile X-Ray in April, Sunrise has sold it to customers such as O2 Communications, Qwest Communications Inc., Telecom Italia and Telefonica and has partnered with HP, IBM Corp., Telcordia Technologies Inc. and Oracle Corp. for business intelligence and OSS integration.

“We believe that by looking at the protocol streams, we can abstract a view that can offer different perspectives and angles to a service,” said Rossano Piccinini, head of Sunrise Telecom’s Protocol Products Group in Italy.

Piccinini said the differing perspectives can be used by different parts of an organization and that each can manipulate the same data to get a desired view. For example, one group can take a service view to see which service provides the best revenue while another group looks at which devices offer the most satisfying experience. He said that with a single box, he can analyze both signaling streams and streams of traffic representing user activity.

While the technology Sunrise uses to gather and analyze streams of data is its own, no one works in a vacuum when it comes to CEM. The company takes some of its cues from the TM Forum regarding which KPIs give the best measure of the customer experience. It takes other cues from Whitelock’s paper on CEM called “Measuring the Customer Experience Gets More Teeth,” which, in part, describes four basic data measurements from which to draw parameters to form a customer experience perspective.

The company focuses on Whitelock’s four data measures: location coverage, subscriber group, services used and the customer device. The first contains data not only on current location but roaming status and history. Subscriber group information includes perhaps the value of a customer, the user groups he or she may belong to (i.e. iPhone users) and a summary of services subscribed to. The service category defines the service type, as well as KPIs such as its status regarding accessibility and quality. The customer device category — perhaps the most difficult to assess — includes the handset type and firmware installed and its status in bandwidth allocation and roaming.

Although Sunrise, Velocent and most others talk in terms of KPIs for determining the customer experience, Whitelock says that is not the right approach. “KPIs are more about whether something works or doesn’t work. You have to build information that can be aggregated around a customer and then you can bump that up against the KPI.”