Microsperience

A key goal on many service providers’ to-do lists for 2010 is to improve their customer experience. This helps them move from the negative downward spiral of pure price competition to a value-based experience. But what does improving the customer experience actually entail? Often, the focus is solely on front-office, customer-facing systems – completely overlooking the vital role played by the OSS. by Teresa Cottam

I’ve had a few conversations recently with a wide range of industry participants and when I’ve mentioned customer experience and OSS in the same breath I can see foreheads creasing and eyes glazing over. “OSS is operations, it’s not really relevant,” said one guy I spoke to recently when we were talking customer experience. I’ve had this same argument so many times recently I thought I’d write a little piece explaining why, if you’re serious about your customer experience, you just have to look long and hard at your OSS.

A key trend in OSS over the past few years has been about optimising costs. In developing markets that’s an important factor in order to deliver profitable services at low price points. In mature markets, however, while cost optimisation is still important, equally important is delivering a high-value and differentiated customer experience. In both high-growth and mature markets the OSS has a wide bearing on the quality and cost of the customer experience. Here are a few examples:

Service fulfilment – once a customer has placed an order they expect the order to be actioned quickly and accurately. Poor service fulfilment leads to delays in service delivery, which are frustrating for customers and a key source of complaints, revenue drop out & customer churn. Service fulfilment challenges are only set to get worse as the volume and complexity of service launches increases. In future, a service provider that lacks the capability to fulfil services accurately, frequently, in volume and at low cost will simply be out-competed by their peers. Automation and flow-through processes are essential.

Fault management – when something goes wrong then understanding which customers are affected and handling the impacts adequately is vital to the telesperience. No customer wants a faulty service, but getting the fault corrected rapidly, combined with proactive customer care, will minimise the negative impact on the customer experience.

Quality of service – it is getting far more difficult for service providers to manage service quality due to service volume, and the bandwidth-hungry nature and ‘peaky’ demands of many next-generation services. Maintaining an appropriate QoS for an individual customer’s or service’s requirements is essential, but this also needs to be done intelligently in order to maintain profitability. Managing QoS effectively involves a wide range of OSS, including network and capacity planning, network management, policy control and service assurance solutions.

Transparency – key operational metrics are essential for building up a picture of the actual customer experience and service usage. Up-to-date and accurate operational data helps improve customer relationship management, business insight and planning, and operational management & investments.

Optimising the OSS so that it can deliver a great customer and service experience efficiently (ie profitably), and can adapt to changing business, service and customer needs, is a key challenge for service providers. Business model or service innovation is all well and good, but get the operational issues wrong and no-one is going to use your fancy new services. Or, equally as bad, you might only deliver an acceptable service quality at vast expense – draining profitability.

The importance of the OSS to the customer experience is something that many OSS firms have long been trying to explain to the market. Amdocs, for example, has been articulating for some time that everything they do is about the customer experience – reflected in the rebranding of its portfolio name to Customer Experience Systems, and underlining the importance of the Cramer OSS unit to its future strategy.

I interviewed Comptel‘s Simo Isomaki for this month’s Telesperience (TS7), and he strongly advocates the importance of the OSS to the customer experience. Simo comments:  “We believe that the OSS plays a key role in the customer experience. What we see is that customers want to shop for communications and media services just like any other goods. They want choice and options; they want to buy on impulse at a price that suits them; and more importantly, they want it all now! From fulfillment to charging and policy control, OSS should make that personalized shopping experience a reality. And those operators with the best market innovation, best customer relationship and most dynamic OSS will be the winners.”

This may be true, but one huge challenge that faces service providers is the cultural, technological and information gap between business and operations. Operations possesses a considerable quantity of valuable data, but this data keeps getting trapped in little eddies and backwaters instead of flowing through the organisation. It is in the gaps between business and operations, however, that we are currently seeing considerable innovation. One example where this is happening is in the area of policy control, where companies such as Bridgewater enable both business- and operationally-centric policy control technology. (For more information see Policy Control: Red Hot Telecoms Tech That Delivers A Great Telesperience.)

Another example of the companies straddling the BSS/OSS divide are those firms that expose operational information in a customer-centric manner to help business staff understand the actual experience of the customer, such as the customer experience management firm Arantech. In contrast to traditional OSS firms, Arantech takes a different approach. Arantech does not simply take a dump of OSS data and then perform some type of souped up BI on it, but instead collects the data directly from the protocol level of the network. This might seem strange given all the data already available within the OSS – surely we already have all the data we could possibly need? “OSS data is great for operational purposes,” explains Arantech’s James Doyle “but that’s the point. The KPIs are built for operations – they are service-centric. In contrast we’re trying to understand things from a customer’s point-of-view, so the KPIs that matter to us are customer-centric.”

Doyle explains that Arantech sees itself as complementary to the OSS approach rather than a replacement for it. “We help service providers bridge the information gap between the OSS and the business,” said Doyle. “We link the BSS and OSS to provide business-focused insight into key operational data, and we think our approach delivers a unique insight.”

Whether or not you agree with Arantech’s view that the data needed to monitor the customer experience should be gathered directly from the network and designed to provide customer-centric KPIs, what is clear is that the OSS contributes in two main ways to a better customer experience:

• a service-focused approach to operations - the OSS needs good quality, up-to-date service-centric data to plan, fulfil, fix and assure. The approach to service quality is necessarily broader brush and the goal is to optimise operations thereby delivering a better service experience to customers. This has big impacts on the telesperience of all customers, as well as on investment decisions and the profitability of the business. Typically, while there is some convergence (for example, across technologies or services), data is still gathered for particular operational purposes and is optimised for those individual needs
• a customer-focused approach to operations - the business, however, also needs access to operational data, but it takes a more business- and customer-centric view. It might lack the skillset to interpret complex OSS data or to access the data, so data needs to be readily available and consumable by the business. The data also needs to be more granular, up-to-date and configurable by business users. (Customer experience management vendors like Arantech are focused on supplying information to sales, marketing, care and business staff not to operational staff.) Technology like policy control systems can also be customer-focused (although not all are), delivering personalisation of the customer and service experience, and bridging the gap between the business and operations.

A key idea here is operations cannot be expected to understand what data the business needs – it’s the business that should decide this and which is best placed to dynamically select and design the information it needs. If the business has to go to operations every time it needs a new data set to help with a new campaign, for example, then this will introduce delays and distract operations from what it is really supposed to be doing. Neither is it acceptable that data delivered to the business is just a by-product of operations, since the business has different requirements to operations.

Arantech’s Doyle illustrates the challenge thus: “An individual customer might be having terrible trouble with their service, but the business might be unaware because operations are telling them that the network quality is fine. Recognising there is an issue with this individual customer’s service and understanding why is not what operational data is designed to tell you. That’s what we do. We’re absolutely complementary to the OSS – we recognise that optimising and assuring operations is an essential element of improving the customer experience – but our approach is to monitor all the elements that make up the customer experience, and look at these from the customer’s perspective.”

We often use the metaphor of the car to describe what is happening in our industry. We talk about cars being hand-made, then coming off a production line and finally being configurable to the needs of individual customers. This delivers both the benefits of the production line along with the benefits of custom-building, and is what telecoms now aims to deliver. Comptel’s Isomaki says: “Some in the industry might argue that only customer-facing systems such as CRM or billing have to do with the customer experience.  But that’s like claiming that your driving experience is limited to the comfort of the seats and the ergonomics of the dashboard! What about the engine? What about the steering?”

Let’s run with this metaphor just a little longer: if we own a desirable car – for argument’s sake let’s imagine it’s the Bugatti Veyron so beloved of Jeremy Clarkson – our experience is dependent on a complex set of elements. We expect a great look and some serious horsepower under the hood for GBP800k. We also want a classy interior, ‘driveability’ and reliability – we wouldn’t be very happy if the thing broke down every five miles or worse still went into a spin every time we went above 200mph. But heretical as it might seem, the Veyron is not for everyone – some of us might prefer the lower price tag and superior fuel consumption of the Ford Mondeo. The great thing about telecoms is that you can have a Veyron if that’s what you want. Or you can have a Mondeo with elements of the Veyron. Or you can have the Veyron when you feel like it, but the Mondeo as your everyday runaround. The OSS offers the ability to personalise your service experience and gives you the choice.

At Telesperience we believe the OSS is the foundation of the customer experience, built on the bedrock of a modern, efficient network. The handset and service might have a sexy design, the network might provide the sheer horsepower, but the OSS provides the control, reliability, personalisation and differentiation, and the vital link between the network and the business. In other words, the OSS delivers the elusive quality of ‘driveability’. Delivering service and business model innovation are of vital importance. Securing the sexiest new handsets for your business may grab headlines. But if you haven’t optmised your OSS so it can dynamically adapt to the demands of new technologies, services and customers – delivering a great service experience profitably – and if you haven’t begun to stitch together the gap between business and operations, then you haven’t really got a hope of optimising your customer experience.