Reader Forum: It's all about the customer experience

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but maintain some editorial control so as to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at: dmeyer@ardenmedia.com or tford@ardenmedia.com.
Somewhat suddenly, the mobile industry seems to have seen the light – everything is about the customer experience. No matter where you turn, vendors are marketing their products around improving the customer experience. Countless articles (such as this one!) have addressed customer experience management or “customer-centric” operations.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s obvious why this is happening, and I’d like to review some of these reasons. More importantly, challenges remain before mobile operators can truly embrace this customer focus and we need to understand and overcome these critical issues.
As a long time executive in the telecommunications industry, I remember well the focus on service quality when the sole business was landline voice services. Those of us from a landline background shuddered as we watched the initial rollouts of mobile communication services. Dropped calls were common. Consumers tolerated noisy lines and areas without service. Charges such as roaming fees were difficult to understand and anticipate. Yet, the services grew despite these obvious quality limitations. Convenience trumped quality and the mobile industry expanded rapidly. With customers willing to tolerate reduced quality, mobile operators prioritized expanding service to more customers, versus improving service quality.
All this has changed. Mobile services are no longer just “nice to have.” Over 20% of Americans have dropped their landline access and rely on their mobile service for voice connections. Business users rely on instant access to e-mail and remote connections to enterprise services for price lists, online order fulfillment and other business-critical functions. Business deals are being won and lost based on dropped connections with key purchasers. Customers are switching carriers due to mobile service coverage or data speeds available with their smart phones.
Besides the critical importance of the quality of mobile services, we have now created an extremely competitive environment where users can switch service providers with relative ease. The availability of number portability and common technology standards enable painless switching between mobile service providers, with users maintaining their mobile number and their equipment. The net result – cut throat competition for users switching between mobile operators. With an average cost of $300 to $500 to acquire a new customer, mobile operators can easily justify improved service quality expenses if they result in reduced customer churn.
Another key factor is the near saturation of the market for mobile voice services. One of my colleagues recently participated in a marketing discussion with a mobile operator that focused on a new service to attract users between eight and 12 years old. For this European operator, the market for anyone over 12 years old was essentially saturated – there simply were no new customers to attract. Although mobile data services are expected to grow substantially over the next few years, most consumers purchase their voice and data services from a single operator. So the market opportunity for “new” customers for data service is limited by the saturated voice services market. With little ability to compete for new customers, mobile operators find themselves focusing on maintaining their existing customers (and growing the revenue for these customers), and trying to attract customers from other operators. Suddenly, service quality and the full customer experience with the mobile operator has become a business critical factor.
Pricing and the availability of specific handsets greatly influence selection of particular operators. But recent studies by several analyst firms indicate that nearly 40% of customer defections from one operator to another are due to service quality issues. So with the increasing focus on customer satisfaction, and the critical role that network service quality plays in this customer satisfaction, it is not surprising that mobile operators are suddenly “seeing the light” of improved service quality and customer experience.
Compared to today’s advanced services, yesterday’s landline voice services were far less complex, and network quality was a reasonable proxy for service quality. If the network was operating as expected, the users were usually receiving good service. In today’s environment, mobile voice, data and video services can now include hundreds of different network elements that work together. The quality of network operations is no longer an adequate indicator of the service quality experienced by the end user.
This complex service environment leads to two categories of errors related to understanding end-user service experience:
–False-positives. Today’s networks are remarkably capable to work around network failures and impairments. The entire Internet structure is based on protocols that automatically learn about network impairments and adjust routing to avoid problematic network elements. Consequently, network problems that may appear severe to the network operations personnel may be having little to no impact on end user service quality.
–Hidden failures. With complex services, we have introduced many new and creative ways for services to fail, often without generating any network alarms. The complex interactions between network elements require provisioning or other configuration actions, and errors in these activities often lead to “silent” network failures, where the customer experiences a service quality issue but no network elements report any alarms or performance problems.
Luckily, as network complexity has grown and the diversity of services has exploded, network and service management technologies have also improved to address this environment.
Mobile operators can monitor the quality of their service delivery to end users through a variety of data sources. Network operators have always collected data on the delivery of individual services to end users, as this data was essential for billing “per call” or “per connection”. This data used to be collected only on successful service delivery (since voice calls were only billed when connected, for instance). But the industry has recognized the limit of collecting only success measurements, and most systems today generate call records or connection records for all service attempts – both failures and successful transactions. When these records are not sufficient, operators may use a variety of probes to retrieve service delivery information from the signaling traffic used to establish or terminate service connections.
In the past, the volume of call detail records or probe measurements was too great to use for managing individual customer experience or service quality. But advances (and cost reductions) in computing hardware, data storage, and data analysis technologies now makes the use of these data sources economically practical. Despite all the advances in technology, human behavior hasn’t changed that much. Voice users still make about the same number of phone calls, so the volume of CDRs hasn’t changed significantly, while the capacity to process these CDRs has increased dramatically. Data services are monitored at a per-session level, and while the number of records represents a large increase versus the volume of voice CDRs, today’s computing technologies can manage these data volumes with a well designed data collection, extract, transform and load process and data warehouse design.
Although increases in server
capacity and cost reductions in storage have enabled the collection and use of per-session measurements for managing the customer experience, this doesn’t imply that this technology is trivial to implement. As always, data will be incomplete and the data collection, processing, warehousing and analysis routines must deal with missing or inconsistent data. And despite the low storage costs, the operator must use an intelligent mechanism to aggregate past measurements and maintain sufficient data details for future analysis. But probably the most difficult technical challenge is defining the appropriate data analysis and reports. The data analysis must result in actionable intelligence or the entire effort won’t produce sufficient financial benefit to justify the costs of implementation. Too often, the problem of sifting through volumes of data and producing useful results is left as an afterthought for the operations staff, and rarely do these organizations have the skills or time for this analysis.
Nonetheless, when properly managed, this data enables remarkable new capabilities for managing the customer experience. Customer care agents can instantly view the recent history of a caller’s service, including recent dropped or failed data connections. This data enables the customer care agent to recognize the customer’s issues even before the customer has spent time describing their problems, thereby reducing the holding time for calls and enabling rapid actions to address the customer’s specific issues. This same data can be used for proactive customer care. For example, a system can send a text message to a customer following a failed transaction, offering suggestions for improving their service or credits related to the service failure. When correlated with network equipment delivering specific services, this data can help identify mis-configured equipment that may be failing to deliver service while not reporting any specific alarms to the network operators.
So, with these new customer experience capabilities available, why aren’t mobile operators adopting these systems at a faster rate? One of the largest impediments to adoption of customer experience management systems lies in the traditional organization structure of the mobile operator. Most established operators treat the network operations separately from the customer care center, which is separate again from the billing and ordering organizations. Customer experience management crosses all of these organizations, providing benefits for each organization, and requiring data from each of these organizations. But the operator budgeting and purchasing processes are often designed around these separate organizations. The operator cannot manage the cross-functional coordination needed to acquire and deploy the CEM technology.
We’ve observed two scenarios that seem able to work around these organizational issues. In small, new mobile operators, typically found in developing economies just adopting wireless technologies, organizations have not yet been established along these traditional lines. And with fewer staff, these organizations are often able to evaluate these multi-dimensional CEM systems and recognize the total ROI available to the operator.
In larger, established mobile operators, some organizations have created cross-functional organizations with the explicit goal of enabling purchase and operation of these systems that cross traditional organizational boundaries. Several large mobile operators have now established a VP level organization to address churn specifically, with set objectives for churn reduction. By the very nature of churn and the relationship to overall customer experience, these organizations work with network operations, customer care, handset management, billing and ordering and other organizations. In such an environment, CEM acts as a unifying structure to address specific, measurable business objectives such as churn reduction.
The future is clear. Mobile operators must focus on delivering the highest levels of service to maintain their existing customers. And the use of customer experience management systems will enable operations throughout the organization to focus on these goals.
Frank Galuppo is CEO at DAX Technologies and is a leading authority on customer experience management (CEM) for mobile carriers and CSPs. He has over 40 years of experience in the telecommunications industry and has also served as a business development consultant to telecommunication network equipment providers. He can be reached at frgaluppo@daxtechnologies.com.