What exactly is a customer?
From an operator’s perspective, the customer definition is extending to include Content Providers, MVNOs, Enterprise applications, Sensors and M2M as well as the individual subscriber. The stage is significantly more complex due to the variety of customers, the multiple services provided and the high degree of personalisation of these services. Maintaining a holistic view of these services, while at the same time providing the ability to zoom in at a granular level to understand an individual customer’s experience is extremely difficult and challenging. Traditional NOC centres need to be able to behave more like ’Trading Centres’ with a wide perspective on how the various services are performing across multiple different customer ’types’ and to monitor deviations in performance patterns and to react accordingly.
What does the future of Customer Experience Management look like?
From a customer experience management perspective, three shifts are happening, namely (1) a move from function centric to customer centric services (2) fault monitoring to capacity reduction monitoring (in an NFV world) and (3) network managers to customer experience managers. Network systems now have to be subscriber, context and application aware and IT systems have to be real time in order to meet business and 3rd party partner needs. In NFV, a key requirement for any network function is the ability to detect and report significant events or anomalies. Of particular use will be the ability to report on real-time Quality of Experience Indicators. From the outset, NFV deployments will be expected to handle high-volume, low-latency collection & stream processing. This enhanced reporting ability will leverage Analytics and Big Data technologies to deliver a detailed view of the customer experience. Analytics guides complex event processing and decision logic based on known patterns and event anomalies. Analytics, together with real time policy and charging are the essential ingredients to enable customer self-service. Empowering customers is key to enhancing the overall customer experience.
M2M, connected lifestyle and wearable multiple devices expose infinite use cases. Monitoring multiple customer ‘entities’, with a variety of different services, detecting anomalies to normal behavioural patterns and ensuring that the network responds automatically and appropriately to the dynamic demands of customers as they consume services will be a major challenge for operators. In addition, operators must also extend customer experience monitoring to media and digital content providers. Sponsored data opens up the possibility of revenue streams for operators, and in return the Operator must provide a guaranteed and consistent quality of service. With NFV, operators will be able to test and rollout new services in a controlled fashion and to tune promotions based on targeted customer responses to further enhance customer satisfaction.
As recognized by the TMForum CEM publications – the essential three components for superior CEM will be analytics, real time policy/charging and self-service. We in Openet believe virtualization of functions provides the pathway from legacy systems to enable the seamless combination of these capabilities.
Sara Philpott, CEO Office – Director Analytics
The above is based on a presentation and discussion on big data and CEM at TMF Live on May 5th 2014
