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Customers in a Coal Mine: Service Management Imperatives Neil Lilley, Director of Marketing, Telcordia The proverbial canary in a coal mine warned miners of invisible but deadly dangers. Is the loss of customer accounts your first warning sign that there is hidden trouble with your services? While communications service providers (CSPs) have long strived for excellence in managing fault and performance issues in the network, elevating that discipline to assuring the whole customer experience is a different challenge. Mobility, broadband, and triple play all increase the difficulty of providing an excellent experience, and at the same time, true competitive alternatives and rising customer expectations make achieving service excellence all the more critical. Success in service management requires a holistic, proactive and flexible approach. Customers Experience a Whole Service, Not a Piece of Network Just because every network element or application server that a service depends on is up and available does not mean that the service is performing as expected. For instance, protocol issues between end-user devices and network components can mean services or features are inoperable, even if each component is functioning normally. Service performance can suffer from traffic issues across the network, even if no single point is suffering from unusual loads. And when an outage occurs, it’s difficult to know who is affected, until your best customers start complaining or leaving. What’s needed is a holistic service model that includes all the devices, network elements and application servers that impact service quality, and which understands the interaction of all this equipment. Furthermore, to bring that model to life, CSPs must monitor "key quality indicators" that aggregate data from multiple sources, identifying the subtle service problems that individual metrics miss. And, when an outage occurs, the best solutions will also identify which customers are affected, allowing the CSP to focus resolution efforts on the highest value customers first. Customer Care Should Know More Than the Customer Unfortunately, customers themselves often provide the early warning that an outage or performance issue has occurred. This can lead to multiple trouble tickets being created for the same issue, not to mention irate customers and confused customer service reps. What’s needed is a proactive system that sees trouble before the customer does. Such an approach allows customer service reps to explain to customers the reason for a disruption and its expected resolution time, without having to open a redundant trouble ticket or researching the issue. In some cases, it may actually be preferable to proactively send customers a message about a network or device issue before they complain. Furthermore, a proactive solution can identify systemic issues with networks, servers or devices that can be solved once to prevent future problems and generate recurring expense savings through avoided repair costs. Hidden Roadblocks Can Hinder Revenue If an individual customer tries to use a service or feature twice, and fails both times, it’s not unusual for that customer to never try again, leaving revenue for value-added services on the table. Enterprise customers expect service level agreements (SLAs) that meet their needs, and they expect the SLAs to be achieved. What’s needed is a system that unlocks revenue potential. By ensuring that end-users will be able to successfully use a new service or feature on the first try, CSPs can ensure the opportunity to earn significant revenue from repeated usage. Furthermore, a system that proves that SLAs are met gives the CSP the confidence to offer premium SLAs and gives the enterprise customer the willingness to pay for them. Additionally, marketers and product managers can benefit from data that illuminates customer usage patterns, as well as network constrains, that can be used to inform product development, pricing and promotion decisions. The customer experience, repair time and cost, and revenue can all be improved through holistic, flexible and proactive service management. CSPs that obtain these capabilities will be best positions to hold onto customers, make them happy, and maximize their revenue potential. For more information, please contact Neil Lilley, Director of Marketing, Telcordia, at nlilley@telcordia.com or visit our website to watch videos and download white papers. |
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