Searching Wide and Deep for the Customer Experience

Service providers always have looked for external validation about their level of customer satisfaction. An entire industry of subjective measurement systems grew up around this need. Today, service providers are gaining the confidence to do what all healthy adults should do: look deep inside for their own validation.

It is ironic that with all the emphasis on customer centricity over the last year or two and all the lambasting of telecom’s supposedly narrow-minded, network view of the business, all the data required to achieve, measure and understand this new world view of customer centricity comes from, where else, the network. Like network management, Customer experience management (CEM) will be achieved by manipulating the reams of data the network itself provides.

CEM may be a corporate buzzword to some, but money talks and when a company like Global Crossing Ltd. says that in 2008 it will invest one-third of its capital expenditures in the development of the seamless, holistic customer experience, that means something.

And when companies such as Sunrise Telecom Inc. and Velocent Systems are developing tools to help measure that customer experience, that means something too. Together, they mean that CEM may be as Karl Whitelock, senior consulting analyst of OSS/BSS Global Competitive Strategies at Stratecast, said, “the final piece to the customer [satisfaction] puzzle.”

However, CEM still has a few pieces of its own puzzle missing. As Global Crossing customer experience officer, Laurinda Pang, said earlier this year, “The next level of customer support comes only if a holistic view of customers is possible.”

Whitelock calls this holistic view a common customer data record and defines it as a common representation of the customer across all OSS. “It is a key architectural requirement,” he said.

He also said some service providers are making progress on developing such a view, but that given consolidation throughout the industry and network complexity in general, it isn’t easy. And without this common customer data record with which a service provider can compare the plethora of usage and service quality data retrieved from the network, CEM falls back to being a mere corporate buzzword.

Assuming service providers are working feverishly to develop this common view, we will look instead to the emerging methods for making sense of all the network data.

Bruce Peterson, founder and CEO of Velocent Systems, believes his company’s method of deep packet inspection (DPI) can provide all the information wireless GSM operators need to measure the customer experience. It generates end-to-end key performance indicators and key quality indicators from the metadata and hundreds of thousands of measurements it takes each day from the biggest aggregation point in the network: the Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN). The GGSN acts as a gateway between the wireless data network and other networks or the Internet.