Taking Customer Service Assurance to the Extreme

On the one hand, now is an unparalleled opportunity for growth. Increased competition in the network equipment market (including the introduction of many quality brands from China) has driven network costs down and allowed inorganic expansion of both coverage and service offerings. One result is that consumers are now enjoying the previously unfulfilled dream of an unwired world with quality applications that have meaningful impact on their lives.

On the other hand, the unexpected increase in network traffic, powered by the new apps and combined with no measurable increase in revenue per user, has already caused some mobile operators to lose precious market share to their competitors. To make matters worse, support issues associated with the new apps and services can take 10 times longer to isolate and resolve, especially with network-centric NOC and Customer Care paradigms in place.

These factors of explosive traffic, longer support time and more complex issues have created “the perfect storm” for mobile operators.

Many operators are managing this new environment well. This is great news, as it is proof of the mantra of all great long-standing companies: the customer comes first. Indeed, in today’s telecom environment, the customer is first and is also in control. Operators who fail to acknowledge this and then migrate to a more customer-centric form of operations and monitoring will quickly suffer the consequences.

To Compete, Operators Must Move to a More Customer-Centric Operations Model

Achieving this customer-centric enlightenment is not easy. It requires a different model for operations and a different type of technical toolset than network-centric operations (see chart).

To this day, network-centric operations, based largely on network statistics and network element (NE) alarms, provide a good indication of network health, but little insight into service-level issues or network/service interdependencies. Worse, the network-centric monitoring used by the NOC is largely unusable by the Customer Care department on the front lines due to its complexity and narrow scope of usable results.