Squeezing the Experience Gap Between Reality and Perception

In the gulf between reality and our perception of it exists a place-in-between as yet unnamed where happiness sometimes goes to die, like the dreams of most Little Leaguers who hope to become Big Leaguers someday. This place between reality and perception is mysterious and difficult to cross. And it is ubiquitous. You find it in physics. You find it in religion. You find it in the different ways a husband and wife interpret an argument, or the way a critic views a piece of art and the way a brute might see it. The best tool for bridging that gap is evidence. But sometimes even overwhelming evidence won't budge people from their perceptions.  

Evidence is what network and service managers use in an effort to cross the gulf between service-performance reality and the customer's perception of it, or better known in our circles as the customer experience. They gather this evidence with highly precise network probes, correlation engines, performance and service-quality management systems and occasionally simply ask their customers what they think. The problem these managers have is that people do not act in the predictable ways required by the measuring sticks they use to determine performance and quality. You can set thresholds on a circuit or a service, but you can't measure your customers' aptitude for technology or if they just suffered a public Facebook breakup and are lashing out at their smartphone. Such frustration may give pause to an operator that wonders if it should continue to invest in smarter, more precise performance tools if in the end it all comes down to fickle and sometimes misguided perception.

The answer is yes. The goal of science – knowing that it may never fully understand reality – is to keep chipping away at it, regardless, and continue to close that gap between perception and reality. The goal of operators should be the same. Even if they don't fully succeed in convincing their customers that a service is being delivered with the highest quality available, they will know deep in their IP-based hearts that the delivery piece of their service meets their quality standards. This way, they won't be put in a reactive mode responding to every complaint or quirky customer with unnecessary expenditures for more capacity. In order to move on to addressing issues of customer education, targeted marketing, device management, self-care, personalized services and relationship building, the service provider must have the confidence that its network performance and service quality are unquestionable.

"Evidence" from recent market forecasts tells us that service providers are expanding their investment in service assurance and network management tools. Analysys Mason's Patrick Kelly, recently release his forecasts for this space and said the service assurance market would expand at a compound annual growth rate of 8 percent over the next four years to reach $28.7 billion. Performance monitoring alone grew by 10 percent last year and the probe systems market by 11 percent. It will take some effort to correlate the data from all these systems, but that is coming as well. A Webinar hosted today on B/OSS by TEOCO had some pretty good ideas on how this can get done.