P3 Group, QuEST Forum and Metrinomics have partnered on new customer experience management services that seek to provide the telecom industry with a more complete view of wireless customers’ experience by leveraging a combination of objective, on-device performance data along with subjective customer reports and anonymous access to industrywide benchmarking information.
P3 focuses on device-based network test and measurement, and has occasionally made reports of its benchmarking work in telecommunications available publicly, as when it benchmarked voice-over-LTE performance in the Washington, D.C.,-area last year or its more recent assessment of T-Mobile US’ Binge On speeds. Michael Wennesheimer, managing director at P3, said the company has been ramping up its device-based data offerings, with crowd-sourced data from an application that collects device-based performance data and analysis of that data. Germany-based Metrinomics tracks and analyzes customer sentiment and experience, bringing the subjective perception of customers into the mix along with P3’s data to bridge the gap that often exists between how providers and customers view the experience of a particular device, network or service. QuEST Forum is an industry organization focused on quality management in information and communications technology, and has a well-established certification and accreditation program through its TL 9000 quality management system standard.
Wennesheimer said being able to enrich actual customer device data with subjective data (brief, pop-up satisfaction surveys will present themselves to P3 app users) means the new customer experience visibility offering will provide something purely objective measurements do not.
Fraser Pajak, CEO of QuEST Forum, said the partnership represents a more comprehensive and detailed view of the customer experience, and QuEST Forum will support a database that anonymizes the information so that companies can compare their own data to that of industry peers – on an ongoing basis, not just one point in time based on a drive test or other discrete testing data.
This is the second recently announced new assessment system for telecom services and customer experience. Global Wireless Solutions will be launching a new OneScore rating system over the course of this year, intended to compete with RootMetrics’ popular assessments of carrier network quality.
The customer experience visibility services from the partnership of P3, Metrinomics and QuEST Forum are aimed at carriers, device manufacturers and infrastructure providers as well as regulatory authorities. Carriers, for example, will be able to compare their own data with anonymized data from competitors, so that best-in-class, worst-in-class and average performance across the industry can provide insights into how performance stacks up against other offerings. The anonymized data is set to be available to QuEST Forum members and other interested parties can gain access to the data through QuEST Forum; occasional public reports may be generated using it as well, according to Pajak.
Hans Jürgen Schmolke, CEO of Metrinomics, said from a system-level view, companies can have the impression that because their systems are “working well from all you can see, and the customer should be satisfied – but from the customer’s perspective it looks really bad.” These sentiments can change rapidly, he added, so tracking changes on an on-going basis is important – and a different approach than the network snapshots that are often provided by traditional testing or rating systems.
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