Getting Beyond QoE Toward True CEM

By Philipe Leon

Unprecedented competition is driving communication service providers (CSPs) to transform for growth by looking at their operating environment, outsourcing and managed-services options, business restructuring and new business models. Customer-focus initiatives address the fundamental business problems of why customers change or stay with a service provider, what attracts new customers and how to effectively up-sell existing customers. These projects require that the actual perception and experience of customers define the business strategy of the service provider and that customer data governs business decisions. What outcomes can be expected from these initiatives? One of my HP colleagues’ blogs at HP Telecom IQ looks closer at the opportunities service providers see from transforming their operations using a customer-centric approach and investing in new Service Assurance (SA) solutions, as well as concrete examples of tangible benefits.

But even though SA is fundamental in customer-focus initiatives, it remains just one brick in building the foundation for a customer-focused organization. Before going on, let’s clarify some concepts. In the past few years, different players in the telecom industry have offered their views of “Customer Experience Management," or “CEM," but still today, there is unfortunately not one definition or consensus of its meaning.

We believe that CEM should be taken as addressing all the facets of the interaction between the service provider and the customer. It’s a broad concept — in addition to easily measurable factors such as activation time for services, service quality, speed of repair, and length of hold time for customer service, it also encompasses an emotional dimension. Factors such as the perceived technical level of customer care, badly performing voice recognition systems, and design and ease of use of websites all enter into the appreciation customers will have of people, services or products representing the service provider organization.

Consequently, if we only target Assurance business processes (in the eTOM sense), it’s preferable to refer to, for example, “Customer Service Assurance," or in the case of HP’s offering in this area, “Customer Experience Assurance," to avoid misunderstanding or misuse of the more global concept of CEM. The distinction is important — if we restrict CEM to just mean monitoring and measuring subscribers’ experience with using the service provider’s voice and data services – what we would refer to as Quality of Experience, or QoE – then there is a risk of missing factors that have a key impact on why a customer stays with a service provider or buys additional services.

Without embracing the whole range of CEM, let’s focus on the part of CEM involving the BSS and OSS, including subscriber data management (SDM), policy management, customer care, provisioning and assurance. The need to personalize and manage the customer experience puts new requirements on how BSS and OSS should support the CSP’s business strategy and processes. Different OSS, BSS and subscriber data management (SDM) functions play different, but essential roles that contribute to a positive customer experience. While Fulfillment processes and BSS functions come into play continuously as services are being subscribed to and used by customers, Assurance processes come into play when something goes wrong, or when something doesn’t work according to customer expectations.

Today, customer data is often fragmented across operational and network domains and across various applications (OSS, BSS, SDM). Customer profiles may vary across systems and customer-data ownership may be spread over multiple organizations. A large part of the business transformations we see today in CSPs require the building a unified customer profile and implementing analytical capabilities, while aligning business processes and organizational changes in order to focus on the customer, not just the network or services, as used to be the case in the past.

Furthermore, in order to assess the transformation effort, CSPs express the need to benchmark their operational performance with peers, competitors and industry standards. Benchmarking allows them to identify potential best practices, provides fact-based objectives and an organizational catalyst to drive transformation. Evidence of the growing interest in this area is the TMF’s Benchmarking Business Metrics Automation Pilot, which will be demonstrated in a Catalyst showcase at the upcoming TM Forum Management World Americas in Orlando in November, where HP will be contributing with other vendors.

Key BSS and SDM functions address personalization of the customer experience through understanding of the customer behavior and proactive identification of both customer sales opportunities and churn risks, and the ability to act upon this knowledge. This is a Subscriber Data Management function with analytics and Policy management. With one view of the customers’ usage and subscriber profiles, the CSP is, for example, able to act on the acquired business intelligence with focused creation and launches of personalized and targeted promotions aiming at retaining customers that are at risk of churning.

The OSS is instrumental in providing CSPs the ability to roll out innovative new services quickly and with consistently high quality. While Fulfillment processes address the need for rapid time to market, Assurance processes address the need for maximizing service availability and quality.

Operators are challenged and stretched to their limits to deliver personalized products and bundles instantly, at competitive prices and with quality customer care. OSS Fulfillment processes play a key role in addressing these challenges by offering personalization and optimal customer experience through order orchestration and product-catalog prepackaged offerings to enable quick introduction of new services, diversity in services offered, and flexible bundling and pricing. (Note: Some of these capabilities are sometimes not considered part of Fulfillment.)

In addition to capabilities that help personalizing the customer experience, Fulfillment processes are essential to speed up the provisioning of services that end-users subscribe to, through automation from customer orders to service activation and delivery. This may include self-service capabilities for end-users, enabling streamlining of the entire end-to-end fulfillment process.

Looking closer at the Assurance stack, we can notice that all components involved in delivering services to subscribers from bottom and up (i.e. from network elements, through network and service management layers, to end customers) contribute in different ways to ensure an optimal availability of services delivered to subscribers. In general, a higher layer is dependent on the layer below to work properly and deliver on expectations.

At the network layer, quickly identifying a network-resource problem and understanding its impact on services and customers is essential for operations staff to speed up problem resolution and allows call centers to provide pertinent information and ensure customer satisfaction. This is critical since any degradation of the quality of service due to network problems is potentially noticeable by end-customers and could lead to a negative impact on the business through poor customer relations, financial penalties and increased customer churn.

In the service management layer, understanding the actual customer experience and its relation to any issues in the network and services infrastructure is essential. Monitoring the network for fault and performance problems is not necessarily indicative of the performance perceived by the customer. Service quality problems need to be resolved before they negatively affect the customer experience, and furthermore, premium users should have the ability to subscribe to QoS guarantees.

In summary, the key capabilities required in this layer are:

• Continuous tracking of the actual user experience with real-time detection and drill-down into subscriber-affecting issues and their association with the health of the network and service infrastructure
• Proactive service quality and service-level management
• Automated end-to-end SLA lifecycle management for very large number of SLAs

In conclusion, customer-focus initiatives are transformation programs that ideally address improvements across all touch points between a service provider and the end-customer. Without targeting all aspects of these programs, we can take an important step toward true CEM by focusing on the needs to personalize and manage the customer experience. This will be achieved with OSS, BSS and SDM functions that combine real-time insight into individual customers’ preferences and their experience in order to intelligently target promotions, rapidly act upon any service-quality issues and promptly react to churn risks.

Philippe Leon is director of the OSS Transformation domain  in HP Communications and Media Solutions. Within HP Enterprise Services, CMS organization, he is responsible for developing HP's OSS products and solutions business.