Professional Documents
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HOW TO IMPROVE
CUSTOMERS EXPERIENCE
INSIGHTS RESEARCH
September 2010 | www.tmforum.org
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Creating a more responsive, personal
and exible experience is a priority
Understanding and tracking the impact of all
the changes across various aspects of multiple
programs was an exceedingly difcult task. A
lack of a clear conict resolution or process
across multiple programs or (in one case)
lack of accountability around reporting changes
that impacted other processes put pressure
on schedules and program costs. Most
respondents felt formal change management
structures and processes were extremely
important, and a few cited organizational
discipline problems.
Organizational change difculties were
expressed as a concern by 30 percent of the
respondents. The most common concern was
the acceptance or non-acceptance of change
by the target organization especially where
consolidation of either systems, processes
and/or organizations were involved. A few
respondents also cited concerns brought on by
changes in a separate entity, as those changes
sometimes have an unforeseen impact on
downstream organizations. While the impact
may have been caused by insufcient planning
or change management processes, it was
seen more as an organizational issue by the
respondents.
Availability of critical skills was cited as an
issue by one-fth of respondents. This was
most consistently an issue of technology
management skills within service providers
implementing new technology, such as web
services. A few also brought up issues with
knowledge and skills around best practices
and process denition, or the ability to think
creatively regarding new business practices.
Finally, a number of service providers
commented on the difculty of determining
where to focus. Given the breadth of the
problem, the complexity inherent in each
of the components, and the state of the
infrastructure, service providers felt they had
gone through years of a process that they
likened those to plugging leaks in a sinking
boat. They thought it would be better to
step back, gain a broader understanding of
what should be accomplished, assess their
current state, and begin the planning process.
Respondents also noted that the most
effective planning was driven by the business
organization, rather than by an attempt to
modernize the IT infrastructure with the latest
technology.
Future goals for customer experience
management
The next question posed to service providers
revolved around plans for the future. Most
respondents were comfortable with looking
ahead two to four years.
Service providers were more conservative
in their response this year than last, with
customer retention and cost reduction heading
the list. Creating a more responsive, exible,
and personalized experience for customers
remains a priority. This will require more agile,
responsive processes and systems, especially
as digital service enablement becomes more
important operationally.
At the heart of these efforts is a push for
customer intelligence. Service providers
increasingly understand the importance of
accurate, timely, comprehensive data on
customers, better analytics and the role they
Figure 4-3: Challenges creating data driven relationships from legacy infrastructure
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32 www.tmforum.org
EXPLOITING
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play in customer satisfaction especially at the
point of opportunity (that is when the customer
is engaged by an agent, a self-service screen,
an interactive voice response, a text or instant
message).
Another important effort is that around sales
and marketing effectiveness. Most of the
respondents felt that once the global economic
crisis nally eases, there would be considerable
momentum in their companies directed toward
deeper penetration of existing accounts, as well
as new customer acquisition. In addition, there
would be a stronger focus on new products
and offers. To gain maximum benet from
these initiatives, service providers will need to
improve their sales and marketing effectiveness,
especially in the areas of opportunity
management and campaign management.
Improving service quality remains a priority
for many service providers, and was seen as a
key driver of customer retention and important
to new services success.
Finally, new customer acquisition will remain
a priority for many. Particular interest again was
expressed in tools like campaign management
and in some cases improvements in service
quality to attract these customers.
While many of our respondents current work
deals with the here and now, such as lowering
costs and cleaning up data drawn from the
labyrinth of legacy systems and network
elements, service providers are planning a
more holistic approach in the longer term. They
will focus on improving data management,
looking to solve customer experience issues
across organizations, and increasing agility and
responsiveness.
In the end, improving customers experiences
will help service providers improve their
protability, and position them as more attractive
business partners in the digital value chain.
Analytical application priorities
We then asked respondents to rank a variety
of analytics categories. We asked for rankings
in terms of overall importance and also current
capability, with 5 being the highest score.
At the top was a tie between contact center
and customer retention for overall importance.
This reected the earlier priorities around
cost reduction and retention. Both received
relatively high scores for capabilities, given
basic capabilities CSPs have in place today,
though contact center analytics edged out
retention tools.
Product management and revenue
management followed closely behind with
scores of 4.1, though product management
received a slightly higher score in current
capability. Product management reected both
the need to assess products for protability, but
also to plan for a large increase in the number
of products and offers available in the future.
Revenue management reected the need to
accurately and efciently capture all revenue to
increase protability.
Service quality management came next,
tied with opportunity management and offer
management. Interestingly, service quality
management scored somewhat higher with
wireless companies than with converged
operators. Most of the concern with service
quality management (SQM) reected the need
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Figure 4-4: Moving to the future cost control and customer retention lead the way
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33 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
Service providers seem to lack priorities
and think everything important
to manage performance of rapidly growing data
services. Offer management reected concerns
about the need to target and personalize,
especially with respect to data services.
Opportunity management concerns mostly
reected execution issues, and being able to get
the right offer to the customer at the right time.
Sales performance management received the
lowest score in terms of capability, but also in
importance.
Interestingly, though there are clear
differences in priorities in other questions, all
of the areas cited here were close together
in importance. This is a worry as it seems to
reect confusion about investment priorities. In
effect, by having a range between 3.9 and 4.2,
CSPs seem to feel that everything is important.
They will need to make hard decisions around
priorities, as addressing all of these needs
at once will be a daunting task, especially
combined with other challenges.
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Figure 4-5: Analytical application priorities
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Importance
Current capability
Area
4.2 4.2
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Respondents felt that
analytics packages were
expensive to buy and
implement, though many
felt there was great
potential value. Data
integration has long been
an issue for analytics,
especially among large
incumbents with decades-
old legacy systems and
data stores.
Barriers to analytics implementation: cost,
complexity and data integration
We asked respondents to name their top three
barriers to analytics implementation. Three
issues led the long list. Tied for rst were overall
cost and data integration issues. Respondents
felt that analytics packages were expensive to
buy and implement, though many felt there was
great potential value. Data integration has long
been an issue for analytics, especially among
large incumbents with decades-old legacy
systems and data stores.
A number of respondents cited difculties
with previous projects as concerns. Many of
these projects did not achieve their goals,
due to data quality issues, lack of business
value, or lack of business participation. Some
respondents felt that this history would be
difcult to overcome, though most felt they had
learned lessons from earlier projects.
Next came employee resistance to change.
Some respondents, especially in older
companies, felt that employees would be
resistant to giving up their old spreadsheets in
favor of fancy new tools, though they agreed
that the newer tools would drive better cross
very important
not important
at all
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very high capability
no capability
34 www.tmforum.org
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functional understanding. This was reinforced by
20 percent responding that current tools were
adequate.
The inability of suppliers to demonstrate
business value was cited by a few respondents,
as was lack of skills availability within CSPs.
Departmental data silos were also cited as a
problem by a few.
Critical success factors: data quality and
clear business cases
Finally, we asked respondents for their
thoughts on critical success factors for analytics
deployments. Again we received a long list of
responses, reecting the complexity perceived.
Not surprising, data quality and relevance lead
the list, showing recognition of the importance
of data to the success of analytics. Also
important is the business case, especially given
the perceived expense of analytic solutions.
Management commitment and well
understood business problems came next,
reecting the need for cross functional
collaboration and high level focus necessary for
large project success.
Tied for fourth were strong program
management, again reecting cross functional
efforts and focus, and business IT partnerships,
indicating the need to collaborate to solve
real business problems and t with business
processes.
Finally, some CSPs cited suppliers support,
ease of use and rapid development capabilities
as important.
While respondents clearly see value in the
deployment of analytics, business conditions,
complexity and some previous project
shortfalls have created some serious concerns.
In addition, as cited in Figure 4-5 (see
previous page), there is little differentiation
in importance of key functions. CSPs need to
clarify their priorities and focus; not everything
is equally important. Suppliers need to work
closely with CSPs to help them identify and
quantify opportunities and business value,
determine realistic returns and, where
possible, simplify the planning and deployment
processes.
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Figure 4-6: Barriers to analytics implementation cost, complexity and data integration
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Figure 4-7: Critical success factors data quality and clear business cases win the day
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35 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
CSPs cannot afford to excel in every
aspect, they must choose carefully
Conclusions and recommendations
Section 5
Compiling this report involved speaking to
20 service providers and a similar number
of suppliers, as well as perusal of countless
strategy documents, white papers, product
descriptions, and other documents. Overall,
we found that although many analytics
and business intelligence (BI) programs for
customer experience are in the early stages
of implementation, there are some lessons
already learned. As a result, we feel able to
make some important recommendations:
1. Understand the big picture
We believe that virtually every point of
touch between customers and their service
providers or partners contributes to customer
perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately
to the protability of the service provider.
Analytics can be used to model, measure or
predict aspects of customer experience. In
addition, there are numerous opportunities
to apply process analytics to improve internal
processes, saving time and money.
Service providers must develop and manage
an enterprise-wide vision of all aspects of
customer interaction, and gure out where
analytics t best if they are to deliver an
appropriate experience to customers.
An overall, enterprise-wide view is most
certainly how the customer experiences
a provider that customer interacts with
individual departments within the CSP and to
understand that experience it must draw data
from all parts of the enterprise.
2. Pick your places
While all service providers perform similar
functions, their customer experience related
strengths, weaknesses, strategies, priorities
and programs may differ signicantly. A
successful customer experience strategy
does not mean the CSP has to be world
class at everything, and in fact CSPs probably
cannot afford to excel in every aspect. Rather
CSPs must determine which areas are most
important for them to succeed and where they
can get payback by using analytics.
Properly applied analytics can help to
determine the areas to be targeted, model and
improve the processes impacting those areas,
and model, predict and measure some of the
results of these actions. The concept here is
that the customer experience strategy and the
related analytics deployment strategy must be
tailored and affordable.
One of the concerns we have here is that
there was little differentiation in importance
in a variety of focus areas. CSPs will need to
make tough decisions in addressing issues
with limited budgets if they cannot prioritize.
3. Mix in some small, fast deployments
CSPs are typically big enterprises, and their
systems and projects reect that; they tend to
be large scale and so take a considerable time
to implement. This is true as well of traditional
analytics and BI projects. They tend to deal
with highly complex problems, require large
and diverse data sets (often of questionable
quality) and often encounter unforeseen
problems. In fact, 35 percent of respondents
named historical project problems as a
serious barrier in our survey, and 20 percent
cited inability to demonstrate value.
By choosing a few small but impactful areas
where analytics can be quickly deployed, CSPs
can rapidly realize benets and gain some
momentum. Selected real-time analytics may
be a good place to start here, as they tend to
draw from current data, and do not require
the collection and rationalization of mounds of
historical data.
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4. Consider a continuous improvement
strategy
It makes sense to approach analytics for
customer experience from a continuous
improvement perspective given the scope and
complexity of the industry, the volatility of the
larger digital value chain, the broad scope of
analytics-related opportunities and limitations
on investment capital.
A good starting place might be modeling and
measuring the impact on customer experience
of a particular process, or set of processes,
to make the most effective changes to them.
The next step could then be to apply process
oriented analytics to determine how to make
the process more efcient and decrease cycle
time. From there, a CSP could apply a similar
approach to other key processes. A handful
of our respondents are already pursuing this
approach.
5. Manage customer data as a corporate
asset, but
We encourage CSPs to recognize that
comprehensive data integration is a long term
project. Almost every aspect of customer
experience analytics hinges upon the accuracy
and accessibility of data. Unfortunately, this
data is found in every nook and cranny of
the service provider organization, in every
imaginable format, and at times in conict with
the similar data from other sources.
Data management programs must, therefore,
address quality issues, and ensure data
accessibility and usability, but they must walk
before they can run.
One approach a few of our respondents
discussed was to focus the most attention on
a handful of critical data elements for initial
improvement. Once they were improved, the
group moved incrementally onto another small
but critical set of elements. This saved time
and money, and demonstrated recognition of
the value to business users an important
concept for IT organizations.
6. Pay attention to privacy laws
Privacy laws vary greatly between geographies,
and must be respected. A single publicly
disclosed violation of privacy laws can have
a big impact on a companys brand, and
ultimately its relationship with its customers. It
is not enough to have policies in data privacy;
training of all customer contact employees
is extremely important and analytics project
participants must be trained as well. Finally, all
applications dealing with sensitive data should
be reviewed as to their access and distribution
policies and controls.
7. Gain top management support
Top management sponsorship and approval
is essential because of the scope, cross-
functional nature and complexity of planning
and executing an analytics strategy. It cuts
across the various processes and organizations
that impact customer experience.
For analytics to become pervasive and add
enterprise-wide value, top management must
walk the walk, embracing fact-based decision
making, pushing for more and better data,
and recognizing achievement when efforts
succeed.
Senior management must also drive priorities
for analytics applications targeting. Customer
experience improvement, after all, is a
business strategy, management needs to direct
which parts of the business need attention
and can benet the most from analytics. Not
only must top management set the vision,
it must determine affordability, allocate
appropriate resources, ensure cross-functional
coordination, and remove some of the barriers
that will inevitably pop up during the course of
implementation.
8. Take advantage of frameworks and
programs
Any help with best practices, data
management and domain frameworks will be
useful because of the breadth and complexity
of the problem. For example, TM Forum has
a number of useful artifacts in this space for
service providers and vendors alike most
37 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
TM Forums Managing Customer Experience
Collaboration Program addresses many issues
notably its Information Framework (SID), in
addition to the Applications Framework (TAM)
and Business Process Frameworks (eTOM),
all of which are well established elements of
the TM Forum Frameworx Integrated Business
Architecture.
It provides an industry-agreed, service
oriented approach for rationalizing operational
IT, processes, and systems that enables
service providers to reduce their operational
costs and improve business agility.
In addition, TM Forums Managing Customer
Experience collaboration program is addressing
a number of relevant issues (see the next
section). Finally, the Forums Business Metrics
Development Programs can be used as a
source of business intelligence, and help
dive the deployment of analytical capabilities,
especially in targeting process improvement
(see page 46).
9. Dont forget your supplier partners
Some 35 percent of respondents expressed
strong concerns about the effectiveness of
commercial off the shelf components in our
survey, yet 35 percent also spoke glowingly
of the partnerships they had forged with their
suppliers and the consequent success they had
enjoyed.
Another 20 percent of CSPs said that their
suppliers could not create compelling business
cases for their products, yet 25 percent more
listed suppliers support and participation as
critical to the success of analytics deployment.
While the applications and implementation
world is far from perfect, it is clear that some
companies are better than others at engaging
and drawing successful engagements from
their suppliers.
Both CSPs and suppliers struggling in
this regard should do a fresh assessment
of themselves and their expectations,
engagement styles and strategies. Service
providers should also include evaluations of
cultural t, experience and methodology into
their vendor selection criteria.
10. Develop your people
Good analysts are hard to come by as they
must acquire and master a broad variety of
skills, including quantitative and technical
expertise, business knowledge and process
design abilities, relationship building, and
consulting, and coaching skills to help others.
Analysts are also highly motivated by
challenging and interesting work, allowing
them to hone their talents and gain a sense of
personal progress. It is important for employers
to recognize these requirements and traits,
and to create appropriate growth opportunities
for analysts, if they want to keep them as
employees.
We believe that these are the key
recommendations for CSPs looking to improve
their customer experience capabilities through
the use of analytics.
What is important to remember here is that
while the overall effort may seem daunting,
the payback for companies that have made
the commitment and are executing has been
worthwhile. We believe that service providers
that can differentiate themselves with a
superior overall customer experience will be
winners not only in their traditional service
markets, but also as enablers of the digital
value chain, and that analytics will continue
to play an important role as a catalyst for
customer experience and process leadership.
We hope you enjoyed this report and found
it useful.
We believe that service providers that can differentiate themselves with a superior
overall customer experience will be winners, not only in their traditional service
markets, but also as enablers in the digital value chain
38 www.tmforum.org
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TM Forums contribution to analytics to
improve the customers experience
Section 6
Specic to the telecommunications industry is
that customer experience is the result of the
sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts
and feelings arising from interactions and
relationships (direct and indirect) over an
interval of time between a customer and their
communications service provider (CSP) when
using a service.
Customer experience analytics (CEA) uses
software to identify and analyze customer
behavior patterns within and across multiple
access points. CEA solutions use sophisticated
data modeling techniques to analyze
customers experiences with a company.
Customers contact companies for a variety
of reasons (service, sales, feedback) and use
a variety of methods to interact (websites,
phone, kiosks, mobile devices, and so on).
Previous approaches to measuring and
managing customer experience (at the
individual access point, or within a specic
department) have included customer
relationship management (CRM) and customer
experience management (CEM) applications,
which are typically aligned with individual lines
of business.
Customer experiences include not only
interactions through traditional channels, such
as purchases, customer service requests
and call center communications but also,
increasingly, through social CRM channels
such as Twitter and Facebook. To manage
the customer experience, companies need
to create a strategy that encompasses
all customers touch points across the
organization.
CEM is the collection of processes a
company uses to track, oversee and organize
every interaction between a customer and the
organization throughout the customer lifecycle.
The goal of CEM is to optimize interactions
from the customers perspective and, as a
result, foster customer loyalty.
Until quite recently, the means for
determining the level of customer experience
was limited to analyzing historic data, usually
collected and stored in data warehouses,
tracking customer interactions with customer
support representatives, market research,
uptake of marketing offers, call records, data
usage and churn analysis. Historic analysis, by
its very nature, yields relatively old information,
by which time the situation, if poor, is very
difcult and somtimes all but impossible to
retrieve for instance, if a customer has
left in search of a better experience with a
competitor.
Todays CSPs need to monitor customer
experience in real-time and be able to address
issues as they happen. In many cases,
proactive customer management is used to
foresee and address potential issues before
they affect the customer. Being able to monitor
the customers experience in real-time came
about after the introduction of sophisticated
network and system management tools, used
primarily for the purpose of problem alarms,
revenue assurance and fraud monitoring. The
combination of all three was quickly recognized
as the basis of an effective CEM system.
However, CEMs goals are best achieved
where CSPs have undertaken some form of
transformation exercise, moving towards an all-
IP, real-time network supported by interactive
business support systems (BSS). The very
nature of being able to address and interrogate
or monitor all network elements, BSS or
Operational Support Systems (OSS), is core to
effective and proactive CEM.
Monitoring the elements of customer
experience is not the whole story, of course.
The analysis of the data collected and the
39 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
Monitoring the elements of customer
experience is not the whole story
actions taken to ensure an optimum customer
experience has become a critical component.
Providing this information in real-time also
allows the CSP to monetize the results by
proling customers for the purpose of target
marketing or advertising, both for themselves
and on behalf of third parties.
Knowing and understanding the customer
is considered key to any successful CSP
operation and TM Forum is addressing how
CSPs can best capitalize on CEM utilizing a
combination of its own Initiatives, They include:
n Frameworx the only integrated business
architecture which provides an industry-agreed,
service oriented approach for rationalizing
operational IT, processes, and systems that enables
service providers to signicantly reduce their
operational costs and improve business agility;
n research and publications;
n Catalyst Projects; and
n white papers.
The highlights are summarized here.
Managing Customer Experience Program
1
Competitive differentiation for advanced and
converged services will rely on more than
traditional service performance targets. Roll-ups
of metrics related to networks, applications,
and IT infrastructure are no longer enough
for matching service quality to customer
expectations. To truly manage the customer
experience, CSPs have to build end-to-end
views of not only the customer and services
consumed, but also of the preferences,
behaviors, personas and social network
afliations that dene the customer.
By understanding what denes their
customers, CSPs have a better chance of
meeting not only present day, but also future
expectations in a proactive manner. With an
emphasis on management of the pre-custom,
pre-service aspects of the customer/provider
relationship, service providers can work toward
building loyalty among their customers.
Loyalty comes from understanding the
customer experience from even before the rst
contact with the CSP, all the way through to the
point where a customer either recommends the
service to another person, does not recommend
the service or churns to another CSP.
At the same time as building an understanding
of that complete lifecycle, CSPs must also grasp
their growing value chains, which tend to hide
or distort their visibility of processes, people
and operations supporting new generation
services. To assure services and better manage
customers perceptions, service providers
have to monitor complicated service level
agreements (SLAs), cooperative partnerships,
revenue settlements and rebates, and different
types of conict resolutions. These are
sometimes radically different to those they are
accustomed to.
To address both the end-to-end view of the
customer lifecycle and of the value chain, TM
Forums Managing the Customer Experience
Program takes a phased approach to:
n using analytics for measuring and managing
service quality;
n dening key service quality metrics at each
point along the service delivery network;
n identifying service quality issues and the
necessary accounting and rebating
information, usage information, and problem
resolution information;
n dening management capabilities to support
each step in the service delivery network;
n specifying appropriate interfaces and
application program interfaces (APIs) to
enable the interchange of such information
electronically between the various providers in
a service value network.
1
http://www.tmforum.org/ManagingCustomerExperience/6513/home.html
40 www.tmforum.org
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CEM Analytics and Frameworx
2
Although the newly formed Data Analytics Team
3
has barely had time to ascertain exactly how and
where CEA ts, it has, through its CEM Control
Center Catalyst
4
(see page 46) identied areas
of the Business Process Framework (eTOM)
5
that impact customer experience and need to be
included in its analytics exercise.
The team analyzed both data and process
information to understand the Catalyst
Projects contribution to the Business Process
Framework which impacts both the Operations,
Fulllment, Assurance, Fulllment and Billing
and Revenue Management (OFAB) and Strategy
Infrastructure and Product (SIP) verticals in
Figures 6-1 (right down to Level 4, highlighted in
grey) and 6-2 (where they are also highlighted in
the grey).
Their work highlighted the missing links within
the Business Process Framework between
CEM processes for:
n planning processes (mainly in the strategy/
product area);
n customer interaction operational processes;
n service assurance and service quality
processes
In addition this project is the rst time that
the Business Process Framework processes
have provided direct feedback to the strategy
processes (such as for executives) and linked
operative processes through simulations and
predictive analytics to the SIP area.
Supplier/partner relationship
management
Supplier/partner interface management
S/P performance
management
S/P problem
reporting &
management
S/P settlements
& payments
management
S/P requisition
management
S/PRM
support &
readiness
Resource management &
operations
Resource Data Collection & Distribution
Resource
performance
management
Resource
trouble
management
Resource
mediation &
reporting
Resource
provisioning
RM&O
support &
readiness
Manage
workforce
Service management &
operations
Service
quality
management
Service
problem
management
Service
guiding &
mediation
Service
conguration
& activation
SM&O
support &
readiness
Customer relationship
management
Retention & loyalty
Customer
QaS / SLA
management
Problem
handling
Market
fulllment
response
CRM
support &
readiness
Order
handling
Manage
billing events
Charging
Bill inquiry
handling
Bill payments & receivables mgt.
Customer interface management
Selling
Bill invoice
management
Operations support
& readiness
Fulllment Assurance Billing & revenue
management
Operations
Figure 6-1: The operations, fulllment, assurance and billing/revenue management processes impacted
Figure 6-2: The strategy, infrastructure and project processes impacted
2
http://www.tmforum.org/TMForumFrameworx/1911/home.html
3
http://www.tmforum.org/community/groups/data-analytics/default.aspx
4
http://www.tmforum.org/CustomerExperience/8691/home.html
5
http://www.tmforum.org/BusinessProcessFramework/1647/home.html
Supply chain development & management
Strategy & commit Infrastructure lifecycle management Product lifecycle management
Strategy, infrastructure & product
Supply chain
development &
charge management
Supply chain
performance
assessment
Supply chain
capability
management
Supply chain
strategy & policy
Supply chain
planning
& commitment
Resource development & management
Resource
development
Resource
performance
assessment
Resource &
operations capability
delivery
Resource &
technology
strategy & policy
Resource &
technology plan &
commitment
Service development & management
Service
development &
retirement
Service
performance
assessment
Service &
operations
capability delivery
Service
strategy &
policy
Service
planning &
commitment
Marketing & offer management
Sales &
channel
development
Product marketing
& customer perfor-
mance assessment
Product & other
portfolio strategy,
policy & planning
Market
strategy &
policy
Product & other
business planning
& commitment
CRM
capability
delivery
Product & other
portfolio capability
delivery
Marketing
capability
delivery
Product
development
& retirement
Marketing
communications
& promotion
41 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
In the enterprise area, enterprise planning and
revenue assurance management gain signicant
advantages through operative analytics and
predictive processes. The scenarios shown in
Figure 6-3 provide a transparent picture of how
revenue assurance processes can be affected.
Specic process benets include:
n Predictive analytics provides considerable
advantages to the communications service
providers (CSPs) and are not only support
processes;
n The viability and existence of mature tools
emphasizes the importance of the decision
and predictive processes within the service
providers CEM processes highlighted in the
Business Process Framework processes; and
n The Catalyst Project provides motivation for
further investigation of the position of decision
analytics processes within the Business
Process Framework not only for product
management related processes.
Data Analytics Team
6
The Data Analytics Team was originally formed
under the Revenue Management Market
Support Center
7
as the Decision Analytics
special interest group (SIG). The Data Analytics
Team has generated so much interest that it has
split out into its own Online Community on the
Forums website. Its primary charter is to help
service providers make the best use of business
intelligence (BI) and analytics tools.
This team is focusing on bridging the gap
between raw BI technology and the specic
business needs of a CSP, as well as pre-dening
how to use BI in the CSP environment including:
n managing CSPs business processes;
n collecting, analyzing and presenting CSPs
data such as orders, data records (xDRs),
tickets, and so on;
n key performance indicators (KPIs) for CSPs to
achieve operational excellence;
n taking BI down to the next level within a CSP,
using day to day operational tools;
n using analytics with reference to TM Forum
Frameworx to provide better customer
experience.
Figure 6-3: The enterprise processes impacted
Group
enterprise
management
Business
development
Enterprise
architecture
management
Strategic
business
planning
ITIL
change
management
ITIL release
& deployment
management
Strategic &
enterprise
planning
Support revenue
assurance
operations
Manage revenue
assurance policy
framework
Revenue
assurance
management
Manage revenue
assurance
operations
6
http://www.tmforum.org/community/
groups/data-analytics/default.aspx
7
http://www.tmforum.org/
RevenueManagement/4323/home.html
8
http://www.tmforum.
org/DocumentsManaging/
TR149Holistice2e/38511/article.html
The team is actively seeking more direct CSP
participation in identifying and prioritizing critical
problem areas for the teams next round of
activities.
TR149 The Holistic End-to-end Customer
Experience Report
The Holistic End-to-end Customer Experience
Report
8
describes how customer experience
and Service Quality Management (SQM) has
evolved to meet the need for assuring end-to-
end quality across the customers experience
when services are delivered through value
chains of cooperating providers. It supports
business scenarios and requirements described
in TR148 Managing the Quality of Customer
Experience (see page 42).
It was designed to supplement TM Forum
Frameworx where consistent design principles
have been applied across areas that have been
designed independently without an end-to-end
customer experience viewpoint.
The Report models what customer experience
is, the customer and user needs that must
be satised to provide good and improved
customer satisfaction, and is based on recent
industry research and standards.
It highlights the importance of understanding
customer and user relationships, and the group
memberships in which they participate, to
The Data Analytics Team has its
own TM Forum Online Community
42 www.tmforum.org
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deliver better customer and user satisfaction.
The Report also describes a technique called
Key Factor Analysis Methodology (KFAM) for
systematically relating technical performance
measurements to customers needs, and hence
customer experience, as well as product and
service features, and SLAs offered by providers.
This techniques strength is that it can be used
by TM Forum members to track changes in
these dependencies over time, and across
market segments.
The End-to-End (e2e) Holistic Customer
Experience (CE) is an ecosystem of six APIs,
and a set of application areas that need to be
designed and specied as a set, to enable
measurement and improvements in customer
experience across a value chain.
The e2e Holistic CE view essentially
identies a set of Application Framework
(TAM) applications and interfaces that must
be delivered as a consistent set with common
information models and e2e holistic customer
experience metrics. It is an end-to-end design of
a subset of the Application Framework.
The e2e Holistic CE metrics are based on
meeting the priority requirements in TR148 and
extrapolated from the results available from
the TM Forum Business Metrics Development
Program (see page 46), the SLA Management
team and the TM Forum Interface Program
(TIP). A specic requirement for metrics used in
a value chain is that they meet a benchmarking
standard; that means both the measurement
tools and the organizations are calibrated against
the standard.
In a sense some aspects of these applications
are nothing new, but these developments are:
n some of the business services supported by
these APIs;
n the integration of knowledge in CEM systems;
n new optimization features of these
applications;
n the relationships between them;
n the notions of virtualized service and resource
management;
n the requirements for e2e Holistic CE metrics
measurement methods.
By applying these new capabilities it is
possible to:
n track customer experience;
n predict trends;
n proactively modify and optimize product offers
made to customer segments;
n trouble shoot service problems;
n build an improved level of customer
satisfaction and loyalty.
TR148 Managing the Quality of Customer
Experience
9
Improving customer experience though
customer-centric methods and analytics is an
important issue for the digital media services
industry as it introduces innovative products,
while at the same time striving to increase
average revenue per user and increase
customer loyalty.
The TM Forum report, TR148 Managing the
Quality of Customer Experience, examines the
factors that inuence customer experience
and a number of business scenarios for the
delivery of digital media services such as IPTV,
mobile TV, enterprise IP virtual private networks
and smartphones all of which are delivered
through a value chain of cooperating providers.
The objective of the scenarios presented
is to examine a range of possible delivery
mechanisms from the perspective of
managing end-to-end service quality across the
cooperating partners; and to work out what
industry standards are required to deliver and
assure high quality service to end customers
and other users.
The main challenge is to establish the impact
a customer experience-centric view has on:
n measuring customer satisfaction;
n discovering where CE/SQM measurements
are needed in the value chain;
n establishing what CE/SQM metrics and
measurements are needed.
CSPs need to be able to monitor and manage
the experience and satisfaction of customers
and users at an individual level and an
9
http://www.tmforum.
org/DocumentsManaging/
TR148Managingthe/38506/article.html
43 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
aggregate level, measured over a range of time
intervals. These metrics are needed to support
monitoring, trouble shooting (individual problem
identication, and resolution) and the reporting
processes of a service provider.
The objective is to provide pragmatic solutions
and a roadmap that can be evolved from what
we consider the state of the art now towards
a fully customer-centric, end-to-end service
management solution for the industry.
This report was developed as part of the
e2e Service Quality Management Program. It
sets out, in broad terms, the requirements for
improving customer experience for services
across a value chain, the challenges of drawing
up SLAs and assuring e2e service quality from
a customer-centric viewpoint. Most of all, the
report identies what needs to be added to
the established and important disciplines of
resource and network-based measures, which
come under the general heading of SQM.
It outlines what customer experience is,
the customers and users needs that must
be satised to provide good and improving
customer satisfaction, and is based on recent
industry research and standards.
CEM Control Center Catalyst
10
The CEM Control Center Catalyst Project was
launched by TM Forums Data Analytics Team
at Management World 2010. It demonstrated a
new approach to product management, where
operational monitoring, data management
and processing, decision engineering and
design approaches are used to provide a
comprehensive navigational infrastructure for
the product manager.
It showed how, by using this approach,
the product manager could simultaneously
balance cost, revenue, and investments that
benet customer experience KPIs to maximize
outcomes of interest. It also illustrated how
operational monitoring could be used to
manage repairs to the rollout process, as well
as reconsidering decisions based on changes to
key assumptions.
In a typical telecom environment, data to
support systematic decision-making can feel
like too much or too little. On the one hand,
the amount of information available, when
combined with the expertise of strategic
planners with different backgrounds and
experience, can be overwhelming.
When launching new products into new
markets, where the past is an unreliable guide
to the future, data that provides guidance for
critical decision-making elements (such as
pricing demand functions, demand for the
product in particular geographies, or the cost of
OSS/BSS implementation), may be missing or
misleading.
This is particularly true of customer
experience-related information, as there
is little industry expertise reecting how
customers overall impression of a CSP and
its brand is shaped by touch points (such as
the ordering process or sales experience), or
how that affects brand reputation, which could
in turn, impact customer behavior, such as
the willingness to pay a higher price. Product
managers make decisions that take brand into
account, however, so their expertise is indeed
there, but is not captured systematically, or
available for continuous improvement.
This Catalyst demonstrated three approaches
to effective product management in this
environment, as illustrated in Figure 6-4 above.
First, it shows how customer experience data
10
http://www.tmforum.org/
CustomerExperience/8691/home.html
Figure 6-4: CEM control center overview
Strategic:
analyze product
alternatives
Operational:
monitor individual
experience
Customer
experience
optimization
Implement product
Adjust product base line
Providing a comprehensive navigational
infrastructure for the product manager
44 www.tmforum.org
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can be effectively gathered, summarized, and
made available in drill-down detail to product
managers as input to effective decision
making.
Next, it showed how this information could
be used for product management decisions,
using a decision engineering and modeling
approach. The model provides decision makers
with holistic, forward-looking information about
how investments in customer experience
will achieve the operators goals surrounding
margins and brand. In addition, it provides a
comprehensive set of KPIs and associated
thresholds that indicate a potential issue.
Then, it demonstrated how, following the
product launch, operations can be carefully
monitored in an operations center so that
problems can be readily detected and repaired.
Rollout problems can be xed tactically, and
addressed through a case management system.
In addition, the early awareness of incorrect
assumptions allows for course corrections in a
product launch to be rapidly and systematically
reviewed and implemented.
Dashboards provided a mechanism to help
the project manager understand the experience
of a large group of customers. As part of the
Catalyst demonstration, they contained data
from about a half million customers. Each
one was represented by metrics gained from
a number of customer experience KPIs; all
customers are ranked based on their overall
customer experience.
The Catalyst demonstrated an innovative
approach to gathering and adjusting the
mechanism for measuring customer experience,
so that it provided valuable information for
product managers. The metric used both soft
and technical quality measures, along with a
proprietary weighting scheme for determining
their values. Importantly, feedback from
customers was used to adjust the weighting
scheme, which meant that the customer
experience metric improved over time, providing
a better and better reection of various
customer groups experiences.
The Catalyst included a collection of data
from many customer touch points including
BSS, OSS, and the network equipment itself.
The team augmented this raw data by
calculating aggregated customer experience
metrics, including the Customer Experience
Index (the weighted sum of technical and soft
measurements on an individual customer basis),
customer lifetime value (the revenue expected
from this customer), customers propensity to
churn, and others.
This means:
n The CSP maximizes the benets of customer
experience investments to achieve goals
involving revenue, costs, and customer
retention;
n Departments responsible for decision-making
and operational monitoring are aligned in a
systematic way through KPIs that represent
key decision assumptions;
n The CSP manages complexity by visualizing
the interactions between tangible and
intangible factors such as revenues, brand,
investments, and decision outcomes by
simulating existing business parameters and
metrics;
n The CSP uses a systematic approach to agile
strategic and operational management, where
the need to reconsider a decision is triggered
by changes in operational KPIs;
n Feedback from customers and information
gathered during a product launch is used to
continually improve the product management
process. The Catalyst showed how a
Customer Experience Intelligence measure
can be improved in this way. Furthermore,
the decision model created a structure within
which new data (both in the form of external
values as well as functional relationships)
could be gathered during operations.
n Brand is an intangible asset that is difcult
to measure and manage, but is
systematically incorporated into the decision-
making process. Brand here is representative
of a class of intangibles (which include
morale, attitude, acceptance, and net
promotion as additional examples) that can
be managed in the way shown within the
CEM Control Center.
45 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
In an increasingly competitive environment,
service providers are seeking new points of
differentiation. There is also strong evidence
to suggest that an investment in customer
experience can provide signicant benets,
even if the initial costs are higher. This is
because customer experience improvements
impact the CSPs brand, which changes the
demand for the product and increases customer
retention.
However, in todays economic climate,
investment dollars are limited, even those for
improving customer experience. For this reason,
there is an opportunity for service providers
to benet from more systematic product
management.
By harnessing and analyzing the data already
present in a CPSs various systems including
BSS, OSS and the network the CSP can gain
meaningful insights into its customer base.
These insights can enable a CSP to provide a
more personal customer experience, tailored to
particular customer communities.
Two examples of this are more personalized
product offerings and more personalized
interactions at the various touch points. The
key is to obtain data from the various sources,
including the expertise of product managers,
and to harmonize it into a consistent model. The
CEM Control Center demonstrated that this can
be done.
All together, the CEM Control Center showed
how a CSP can improve strategic and tactical
planning through:
n using improved information about the present;
n more intelligent analysis to predict the future;
n changing direction more effectively by
communicating the decision-making rationale
to stakeholders through visual tools.
This allows the operator to identify issues
within a timeframe to take corrective action if
required.
The Catalyst also showed how new
technologies for high performance, high volume
data extraction, storage, and analysis can be
used to reap valuable information from the
The metric was constantly rened better
to reect customers actual experience
network that reects customer experience in a
way that can be improved over time. Ultimately,
these techniques enable service providers to
better manage the inevitable risk, uncertainty,
and complexity involved in every product
launch. This improved risk mitigation enables
CSPs to be more aggressive, gaining a stronger
competitive foothold in todays rapidly changing
environment.
Business Metrics Development Program
The business metrics that have been developed
within the TM Forums Business Metrics
Development Program represent areas of
business operation that are important in
assessing business performance, customer
satisfaction and loyalty, and efciency.
To provide an holistic, business-oriented
benchmarking facility, the business metrics
scaffold is based on a balanced scorecard
approach. To this end, three major domains have
been dened:
n Revenue and margin: providing a view of
scal performance;
n Customer experience: providing a view of
the measures that impact the end-customers
reaction to the service offering, which also
drives loyalty;
n Operational efciency: providing a view of
cost and expense drivers.
Figure 6-5: Structure of the business metrics domains
Revenue & margin
Customer
experience
Operational
efciency
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Under each of these domains, a set of topics
has been dened to drive the development
of specic metrics. The following illustration
presents the topics under each domain and
is followed by an explanation of the different
topics:
The Customer Experience Domain covers:
n Preferred access: what are the channels and
touch points available to customers, such as
actual person, web and store?
n Customer time spent: amount of time spent
on process or activity that impacts the
customer, such as the length of time system
could not be used, as opposed to fault repair
time;
n Usability: how easy it is to set up, usefulness
of documentation, and so on;
n Reliability of interaction: this includes
the consistency and accuracy of information
provided by the CSP and also relates to the
credibility of the CSP;
n Availability of purchased service, including
bearer service and content;
n Security: (future work item);
n Pricing exibility: preferred pricing mode
available, such as prepaid card, at rate, by
usage (future work item).
The GB935 Business Benchmarking Metrics
Scaffold
11
provides a more detailed overview
of TM Forum benchmarking activities around
custmer experience. Additional information
concerning each metric and its corresponding
benchmarking data is available by contacting
the Business Metrics Development team at
benchmark@tmforum.org and/or subscribing to
its reports and services.
Conclusion
There is a strong movement by CSPs to
use sophisticated analytics, increasingly in
real-time, to provide current and relevant
information about their customers experience
benchmarking. It is a sign of a CSPs maturity
that after the subscriber grab slows down,
they start to focus on how to determine which
are the most viable customers. The next step
is to ensure those customers enjoy an optimal
experience when dealing with the provider to
retain their custom.
Software suppliers and systems intergrators
are also seeing this as a major growth area.
They are mobilizing efforts to provide systems
that can provide effective and timely reports on
customer experience and tie them to systems
that provide alarms, remedies and focused
responses, which are geared to provide the
ultimate customer experience.
TM Forum, through its programs and
extensive base of CSP and supplier members,
will continue to provide relevant information
and guidance on the latest developments via its
Online Collaboration Communities, programs,
research and publications.
Figure 6-6: Structure of the business metrics topics
Revenue & margin
Customer
experience
Operational
efciency
1. Preferred access
2. Customer time spent
3. Usability
4. Accuracy
5. Contact availability
6. Security
7. Pricing exibility
1. Margin/revenue
2. OpEx/CapEx
3. OpEx/Revenue
1. Unit cost
2. Time
3. Rework
4. Simplicity
5. Process exibility
& automation
6. Utilization
11
http://www.tmforum.org/browse.
aspx?linkID=43225&docID=13486
TM Forum, through its programs and
extensive base of CSP and supplier
members, will continue to provide
relevant information and guidance on
the latest developments via its Online
Collaboration Communities, programs,
research and publications.
C
M
Y
CM
MY
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CMY
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BenchmarkAdUSLetterv2.pdf 1 3/15/10 11:26 AM
48 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
Customer insights:
Building relationships that stick
Developing more insight into customers is the key to keeping
them happy and building loyalty. Nokia Siemens Networks can
provide end-to-end solutions that reveal what service providers
customers really want, and can even predict what theyre going
to do next.
Keeping track of what makes subscribers
happy or not is crucial for any
successful communications service
provider (CSP). According to a study by
Bain & Company, a ve percent increase
in customer retention can boost a CSPs
protability by 75 percent. Its a lesson
that CSPs around the world are taking to
heart, and theyre going to great lengths
to build stickier relationships with their
customers.
Any strategy for delivering a better
customer experience is underpinned by
understanding what customers want. It
relies on pulling together data to build
a coherent picture of each subscriber.
Traditional customer surveys and feedback
are helpful as far as they go, but real
customer insight is about much more than
that. It involves breaking down the barriers
within the CSPs organization to bring
together real-time data about charging,
subscriptions, devices, service usage,
online behavior and how customers
perceive the experience. These disparate
snapshots come together to form a prole
or digital identity for each customer.
CSPs can then use this insight to identify
priorities for creating real value, perhaps
through more innovative services, more
focused marketing, or by providing
improved customer care.
Achieving these aims depends on
having the systems in place to act on
these insights automatically in real-
time or near real-time across the CSPs
organization and processes. Its this ability
to take targeted action at the right time
that ultimately boosts the business.
Building a customer-centric network
Nokia Siemens Networks has the end-
to-end capability to ensure that CSPs
can address any aspect of the customer
experience, from device management and
identity management to churn prediction,
from mobile broadband strategy and
quality optimization to automated
customer care.
This capability helps CSPs to create
a customer-centric network by
collating and analyzing real-time data
and information from devices, networks
and IT systems. It includes inputs about
subjective perceptions, as well as data
related to services, subscriptions, devices,
charging, billing and CRM systems. This
will provide a unied view of individual
customer needs and enable CSPs to
take timely action to link their customer
insights to business and operational
processes, using automated solutions
to boost speed and efciency wherever
possible.
Nokia Siemens Networks is unique in
delivering a real-time response to whats
happening in the network and supporting
systems. Our solutions go far beyond
simply consolidating subscriber data and
aggregating and warehousing a CSPs
customer data. This is incredibly important
in a market where CSPs must tailor their
offers specically to each customer.
The most obvious examples are time-
and location-specic offers. People are
much more responsive to offers if theyre
timely and relevant to their situation at
a given moment. For example, if a CSP
offers music fans the chance to buy a
bundle of MMS messages as they enter
49 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
a concert venue, theyre likely to take up
the offer because theyll want to take
pictures of the concert and send them to
their friends. Its not possible to achieve
this if it takes 72 hours for a report from
a static database query to reach the CSP
system that sends the promotion to the
customer.
With instant feedback, a CSP can
run many such highly targeted micro-
campaigns. Nokia Siemens Networks
worked with one CSP to help it generate
an extra 25 million a year by increasing
its campaigns from four every three
months to 15 per week.
As the communications industry
evolves to offer a wider range of
innovative and life-enhancing services,
those CSPs that put a solid customer-
centric network in place will be best-
placed to maintain a competitive edge by
offering subscribers relevant and tailored
services and deals.
Many businesses discover that
achieving that ideal means changing
their existing culture. For example, one
European CSP found that data was held
throughout its organization in more than
200 legacy systems, leaving it unable
to track even the most basic network
activities. Nokia Siemens Networks
delivered a solution that combined
consulting services and technologies to
pull that information together and improve
every area of the CSPs operation.
The CSP can now spot network
problems 20 times faster and resolve
them in one third of the time, leading
to savings of 1.4 million in 2010. In
marketing, fewer provisioning problems
led to better service uptake and boosted
revenue by 5 million in 2010. Increased
network availability is helping operations
to secure revenue of 500,000, which
might otherwise be lost.
Automating customer care
Care has always been an important
contact point between CSPs and
subscribers, with the quality of care
services having a huge inuence on
how providers are perceived. The rise
of smart devices is making it even more
of an issue, however. Smart phones are
expected to account for 43 percent of
mobile devices by 2013, and it has been
estimated that smart device support calls
last an average of 45 minutes, which is
three times longer than calls to customer
care about feature phones (Source:
www.mobileeurope.co.uk, April 2010).
Additionally, the top smart device
issues at call centers relate to email
conguration, lost phones and Internet
settings. While an automated care system
may not be able to do much about non-
technical issues such as lost devices,
other than wiping and locking the device,
it can speed up the handling of technical
complaints and requests, which account
for around 15 to 20 percent of the total.
These specic issues are also the most
costly to resolve for the care organization.
For example, more effective service
provisioning should enable customers
to set up and access services without
consulting their CSPs care team. There
will always be some issues that cant be
sorted out by users and in these cases its
great to have friendly and helpful support
staff. However, thats not as important
as giving those helpline personnel the
tools to solve problems quickly and
effectively. The aim is to solve as many
queries as possible during the initial call
and to minimize the number of cases that
need to be passed up the line to technical
support staff. Nokia Siemens Networks
solutions link operational and business
support processes directly with real-time
insights to generate real-time automated
actions that resolve problems fast.
Our customer care automation solution
From subscriber data to customer value.
From customer value to business results.
Real/elapsed
time actions to
boost business
Customers
Spread out
data
Understanding
where the
real value is
One view of
a customer
Customer data
coming from
many sources
Services &
innovation
Marketing
& sales
Network
planning &
optimization
Operation &
maintenance
Customer
care
Business intelligence applications
Reports, dashboards, analysis & query, segmentation, profiling
Real-time & historical data collection, consolidation and exposure
Basic analytics including metadata
Real-time & long term data storage and consolidation
Billing, charging, subscription, service usage, device, CRM,...
Customer care automation solution solves more than
50% of technical problems in a few seconds
1 Source: www.mobileeurope.co.uk, April 2010
2 Informa
Orange Switzerland needed to improve
customer satisfaction by reducing
complaint handling time, while
decreasing the amount of complaints
escalated to customer care technical
support.
Nokia Siemens Networks provided Orange
with Customer Care Automation solution.
We can solve technical problems
during the first call in 50% of the cases.
Response is available on average in
20 seconds.
European CSP
SMS complaints escalated to customer
care technical support decreased by 30%,
and to IT operations decreased by 60%.
Smart device support calls last an average
of 45 minutes 3x longer than calls to
customer care about feature phones
1
and
these will be 43% of devices in 2013
2
.
50 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
offers genuine, one-click problem
resolution. The system works behind the
scenes to correlate technical data from
across the CSPs systems and deliver a
rm diagnosis and solution to the problem
via a simple, one-screen interface.
For one European CSP, customer care
automation has helped to increase its
rst call x ratio by nding the problem
in 50 percent of cases, on average within
20 seconds. Furthermore, the ticket
handling time by customer care technical
support has decreased by 50 percent.
The number of complaints passed on
to technical support also dropped by 30
percent, and the complaints escalated up
to IT operations dropped by 60 percent.
Five steps to better mobile broadband
Another big area where customer
insights deliver all-round benets is
mobile broadband. Two years ago,
when fewer people were using
mobile broadband, most of those in
mature markets werent worried about
network quality. Fast forward a few
months and the rapid uptake of mobile
broadband has created a bulk of users
who have expressed higher levels of
dissatisfaction with the service they
get from the network. (Source: Nokia
Siemens Networks Acquisition and
Retention Study 2010).
Nokia Siemens Networks offers
end-to-end quality of service (QoS)
differentiation to help CSPs target highly
segmented groups of users with the
satisfying products and offers that meet
their specic needs. The simplest way to
visualize our approach is as a continuous
cycle of improvement in ve steps.
Step one is about mapping how users
consume mobile broadband. What are
their favorite applications? What size
are the les they download and upload
and what volume does that add up
to over the month? When do they go
online and which devices do they use to
gain access? All this information should
be easily accessible to the product
managers designing services for the CSP.
For example, one European CSP found
that just 5 percent of its customers were
generating between 80 and 90 percent of
network trafc, leading to congestion and
dissatisfaction among high-value users.
Its a problem that CSPs ignore at their
peril. The latest acquisition and retention
study from Nokia Siemens Networks
found that average churn in mature
markets may be stable, but churn is on
the rise among smart phone users and
other high-value users, so CSPs must
nd ways of satisfying them better. The
answer is to identify the different user
segments and make differentiated offers
to each group.
That leads us to step two, in which
product managers often with the help
of Nokia Siemens Networks consultants
devise differentiated offers based
on QoS, volume thresholds, price or
bundling with devices. The key is to
identify the different user groups and
target them with different packages. For
example, business users will typically
be looking for high QoS but wont be
worried about price, while teenagers
are looking to achieve access on a
tight budget. Between these quality
sensitive and price sensitive
extremes are groups such as the price
elastic, who are the most likely to
increase their service usage in response
to attractive off-peak offers, and
inuential users, who its important
to keep on-board since they inuence
their peers by being very active on social
networking sites.
Step three is about CSPs delivering on
their promises by implementing the right
policy controls in their network servers.
Enforcement is step four, and requires
the right tools to check that users arent
exceeding their volume thresholds, for
instance.
Telco 2.0
CSPs have a unique opportunity
Customer
Connectivity and network control, individual relationships, real-time monitoring and charging
enable CSPs to take the responsibility for protecting customers personal information.
Communications
Service Provider
Customer
Insight, Identity
& Privacy
Management
Trusted Identity
Partner
Trusted Privacy
Partner
Trusted Insight
Partner
Internet Service
Providers
Enterprises
Winners in the business service innovations category
of the 2010 Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards!
Movistar Argentina and Nokia Siemens
Networks were recognized for using the
Identity Management solution to link
subscribers multiple online identities
and multiple Web sites such as Flickr or
Facebook with their mobile phone
avoiding separate sign-on procedures.
This simplifies the end-user experience
whilst obviating identity theft and allows
Telefnica to provide a range of
personalized services.
Service differentiation allows us to attract more subscribers
while reducing churn. With the Identity Management project,
we are sure of ushering in a new level of end-user experience.
This is a big win for us and encourages us to offer many more
innovative platforms in future.
Diego Scalise, Value added service manager & senior
architect, Movistar Argentina
Customer insights:
Building relationships that stick
51 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
The nal step is monitoring the
customer experience. Are they enjoying
the levels of service that theyre paying
for to the full, or might they perceive
that theyre getting poor value because
theyre not using all the applications
theyre entitled to or falling well short of
their download thresholds, for instance?
The Nokia Siemens Networks portfolio
encompasses the whole circle.
Predicting and preventing churn
CSPs have been moving away from
looking only at historical data and
towards using real-time information to
deliver real-time benets. Some have
been going even further, however, with
companies including Vodafone and
Singtel using data to accurately predict
customer behavior. Its an approach
thats proving especially useful in
spotting those subscribers who are
most likely to churn. The technique is
called social analytics.
Nokia Siemens Networks uses
market-leading social analytics
products to combine usage behavior,
demographics and social networking
information to predict churn and the
likely responsiveness to offers. One
European CSP used this approach
to boost the accuracy of its churn
predictions by 70 percent within its top
10 percent of customers.
Social analytics also enables CSPs to
predict how well people will respond
to different offers and make sure that
customers are offered only the most
relevant promotions, thus giving them
a better experience by being less
intrusive. Of course, social analytics
algorithms are only effective if they
have access to good underlying data,
so they rely on subscribers giving their
consent for CSPs to use their personal
information in this way.
A question of trust
CSPs arent the only organizations that
can make a strong business case for
nding out more about their subscribers.
Web 2.0 companies such as Google,
Flickr and Facebook all track customer
behavior, while organizations as diverse
as airlines to banks could benet from
getting to know their customers a little
better. On the other hand, customers
are aware that privacy can be an issue
and they want to retain control of their
information.
Still, research shows that the greater
the perceived benet of sharing, the
higher the proportion of people who
are willing to share (Source: Nokia
Siemens Networks Privacy Study 2009,
Psychonomics). Better still, the same
survey shows that consumers trust
CSPs to take care of their data. Only
banks score more highly. No one else,
including ISPs, insurance companies and
even governments, are trusted to the
same degree.
This puts CSPs in a strong position
to become a trusted partner for their
customers, gaining permission to use
their data to improve the customer
experience and service offering while
identifying new business models and
revenue streams. CSPs can act as data
brokers between customers and Web
2.0 providers, sharing information such
as location, presence, reachability and
device capabilities with third parties
in a controlled way. They can provide
users with an online identity that
enables single sign-on for the Web,
freeing people from the growing list of
passwords and security questions.
For example, Nokia Siemens
Networks and Movistar Argentina,
a subsidiary of the Telefnica group,
recently won a Global Telecoms
Business (GTB) award for Business
Services Innovation. The award
recognizes an Identity Management
(IDM) solution that links Movistar
subscribers multiple online identities
and multiple websites, such as Flickr or
Facebook, with their mobile phone. This
means they no longer need to sign on
separately for each service.
Customer experience transformation
Nokia Siemens Networks unique
combination of capabilities can maximize
opportunities for CSPs. Thats the
secret behind more than 120 customer
insight-based service improvement
projects that we have already delivered
successfully worldwide.
We know what data is available and
how to deliver it to the right place fast in
order to derive the maximum business
value. We recognize that customer data
is a valuable yet sensitive asset. Our
know-how and experience can help
protect it. We help CSPs develop the
right strategies and plans and follow
them through to a successful launch and
implementation.
We are uniquely able to leverage
subscriber data and make it available in
real-time. This promotes agile decision-
making and enhances business and
operational processes.
Our solutions turn data into insights
and enable CSPs to act on those
insights. Our end-to-end approach also
comes with a clear commitment to
security and privacy at every stage.
Through Nokia and our own acquisition
and retention studies, as well as external
research, our unrivalled understanding
of the markets can help CSPs develop
segmentation strategies and implement
them within their operations.
We help CSPs transform their
businesses to take a genuinely
customer-centric approach.
52
SPONSORED FEATURE
www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
Exploit Information Sources
The competitive intensity of the
Telecommunications Industry is
increasing rapidly as the growth
rates in new subscribers slow down
in many markets around the world.
The markets for many connectivity
services are approaching saturation
and new competitors are entering
telecommunications markets with lower
cost services and alternative business
models. In this market Communications
Service Providers are looking for new
means to increase revenue and prot
by retaining their existing subscribers,
selling additional products and services
to their current subscribers and nding
new ways to attract subscribers away
from competitors.
Communications Services Providers
have found they can use the information
generated across their enterprise as
a source of competitive advantage.
Information generated from network
events, billing records, CRM systems,
web trafc, product management
databases and other systems can be
exploited to improve the effectiveness
of business processes across the
enterprise and provide unique insight
into new opportunities. CSPs of all
sizes can increase revenues, prots
and customer satisfaction by managing
information assets more effectively,
analyzing information in real time, and
employing historical and predictive
analysis to optimize processes
throughout the customer lifecycle.
Aggregate, Analyze, Act
In this brief we outline a strategy
for optimizing customer experience
management via a logical
implementation of capabilities that
focus on: aggregation of all relevant
data/information that support the
customer lifecycle; application of a
rich set of analytical tools (including
real-time) that enable LOB to quickly
and accurately assess the current
state of market, products, network
services, devices, customers, etc; and
automation to translate analysis into
action. The capabilities described are
enabled by IBMs Service Provider
Delivery Environment, which is a widely-
deployed framework that allows a
provider to accelerate new services and
business models, achieve operational
and network efciencies, and
differentiate the customer experience.
Critical Role of Data in Support of
Analysis and Action
TMForums 2009 CEM report stresses
that data is the backbone of customer
experience processes. One of the
greatest challenges is managing
the increasing volumes of data that
are critical in providing a uniquely
differentiated customer experience.
Key sources of data include: customer
information, with the goal of providing
an accurate, complete and consistent
view across all lines of business and
channels; an enterprise product
catalogue that efciently manages
the detail, policies, business rules and
complexity of a providers offerings
across all channels and enables rapid
changes to product information;
the network, with an ever greater
volume of XDRs and operational data,
provides, perhaps, the richest source of
information with the greatest potential
to positively impact the customer
experience, assuming the provider has
the capability to capture, process and
analyze the massive volumes of network
data either in-ight or within a database
or data warehouse.
However, to gain the most from these
data, providers need to implement an
information management strategy that
encompasses data quality, consistency,
latency, comprehensiveness,
governance and lifecycle management
to insure that LOB activities and all
customer interactions promote loyalty
and protability. Automatic aggregation
of multiple data sources and formats
presents a challenge; excessive time
taken in rationalizing and normalizing
this data into one consistent format
prevents timely business decisions and
actions.
Information Management Strategy
for Network Intelligence
IBMs InfoSphere products and
Telecommunications Data Model solve
these issues for a European mobile
broadband provider. The providers
network intelligence approach
aggregates data from multiple sources
network, CRM and billing, to enable
near-real-time monitoring of network
performance and customer experience.
The single source of network
performance and customer behavior
also allows the provider to segment
subscribers based upon calling/usage
patterns to gain insight into customer
experience and service requirements
with the goal of continually optimizing
network performance.
Every customer interaction is a
potential source of detailed customer,
product and network information to
be captured, processed and analyzed
to provide deeper market insight and
further improvement of customer
experience. However, these massive
data volumes create data storage
challenges. Alternatively, providers may
want to consider a data archiving and
retention strategy to reduce storage
hardware costs.
Customer Lifecycle Provides a Wealth of Insight
Aggregate, Analyze and Act to Optimize the Customer Experience
53 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
Managing Data Growth
To cost-effectively accommodate
petabytes of data growth associated
with customer and network data, a
North American triple play provider
adopted an enterprise archiving strategy
to curtail additional storage node costs.
IBM Optim allows the provider to
identify and archive volumes of historical
data to more cost-effective media, while
still allowing the provider to quickly
access or reference that data when
necessary. Savings in storage hardware
more than justied the investment in
IBMs archiving solution.
Analytics Maximizes the Value of
Customer, Product and Network Data
By successfully addressing data
governance and lifecycle management
a provider establishes the foundation
for accurate and meaningful analysis
of customer, product and network
data. To exploit the latent potential of
these data, a provider needs analytic
capabilities which can be applied to
myriad data sources (both structured
and unstructured) in both real-time and
traditional fashion to deliver actionable
insight to optimize all aspects of the
customer experience.
Accurately Targeted Campaigns
IBMs InfoSphere Streams, SolidDB and
Cognos Now! allow an Asian mobile
provider to efciently determine which
offers are most attractive to particular
customer segments. The process begins
by creating as many as 700 promotions
to offer to sample groups of subscribers.
Real-time analysis and reporting enables
the provider to determine which
promotions are most relevant. These
promotions are then offered to a larger
audience while continually analyzing
the results of the offers. Iterative
renement and analysis quickly result
in a set of relevant offers specically
tailored to different market segments.
The real-time analysis, reporting and
automation of this process increase the
success rate of marketing campaigns
while simultaneously lowering campaign
costs.
Analytical capabilities should permit
lines of business to quickly assess
the current state of affairs relative to
their specic responsibilities sales,
product protability, churn, network
performance, campaign results,
customer service, spam detection
and elimination, and fraud, etc. and
apply this insight to further improve
performance in these areas.
Analytics Prevents Fraud
IBM Identity Insight enables a European
provider to detect fraudulent account
activation attempts by automatically
analyzing customer information
phone number, credit card information,
postal address, IP address or other
distinguishing attributes across
disparate data sources. The information
is scored using sophisticated algorithms
that calculate providers risk based on
product cost along with data from usage
monitoring and payment collections
to provide a comprehensive view of
customer behavior compared against
historical information to reveal potential
fraud. One quantiable benet of
employing IBM Identity Insight is that
the provider avoided the nancial losses
associated with provisioning iPhones to
fraudulent individuals.
To improve all areas of the customer
experience in the context of customer
lifecycle, analytical capabilities
should ideally encompass statistics,
modeling, data mining, predictive and
prescriptive capabilities. With these a
provider can develop more accurate
market segments, model buying
behaviors or purchase propensities,
launch carefully targeted promotions,
determine appropriate next best action
scenarios, assess network performance
in real time, facilitate capacity planning
for network build-out, develop
predictive models for churn mitigation
and customer lifetime value, and
continually evaluate the efciency and
effectiveness of customer interactions.
Early Assessment of Customer
Experience Mitigates Churn
A European provider employs IBM
SPSS to assess and analyze customer
experience throughout the customer
lifecycle. The provider discovered
that unsatisfactory events in early to
midterm lifecycle have the greatest
effect on churn. Implementing a survey
program targeted at customers who
had been with the company for about
seven months identied more than 100
indicators predictive of customer churn.
The provider can now identify at-risk
customers with a 78 percent degree of
accuracy. By proactively engaging at-risk
customers the provider has reduced
churn rates from an average of 19
percent down to 2 percent.
Previously ignored sources of
customer insight contained in email,
CSR logs, blogs, IVR and social media
can also be exploited. Unstructured,
textual and contextual information
contained in these sources provides
insight into market trends, competitive
activities, customer sentiment,
product/service issues and can provide
guidance for additional cross-sell and
up-sell opportunities. In combination
with customer, product and network
data maintained in a data warehouse,
unstructured information provides
Reduce churn
Provide
marketing
visibility into
customer
behavior and
service usage
Improve customer
satisfaction
Empower
customer-facing
groups
Control
operational and
investment costs
Protect and increase
roaming revenue
Ensure successful
launch of new services
and user devices
Discover
un-tapped revenue
among existing
customer base
Provide operations insight
into customer experience
54 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
a signicantly more detailed view
of the customer, enabling product
development, sales, marketing and
customer service to more accurately
develop, deliver and support relevant
services.
Voice of the Customer Via
Unstructured Content
An Asian provider employs IBMs
Content Analytics to glean insight
from CSR call logs, email and inquiries
received from customers. Analysis of
unstructured content enables product
management, marketing, nance, sales
and service management to gain a more
detailed understanding of the voice
of the customer. This has allowed the
provider to offer an optimum set of
services for mobile phone customers,
create a more compelling loyalty
program, establish more favorable offers
in model and service upgrades for loyal
customers and create a FAQ data base
which facilitates faster call resolution
and increases the usefulness of the self-
service web site.
Critical to the efcient analysis of the
massive volumes of provider-managed
data is the ability to continually capture,
process and analyze data with minimum
latency and translate this real-time
insight into business opportunities. Real-
time insight can help providers establish
protable contracts with retailers and
issue context-sensitive promotions to
their subscribers. Real-time context can
be derived either based on locations or
browsing patterns on smart phones.
Technologically progressive service
providers have been using real-time
analytics for a variety of purposes
such as location based promotions to
maintain high utilization of assets during
off-peak hours, real-time promotions
to group leaders or social network
leaders as well as subscribers prone to
churn and identication and pro-active
notication regarding network problems.
Network Analysis Reveals Millions
in Lost Revenue
A provider desiring to obtain a more
granular understanding of customers
wireless experience in order to reduce
churn employed IBMs Tivoli Netcool
Customer Experience Management
to conduct a proof of concept
using real-time data from 6 million
subscribers. The analysis revealed
that an astonishing 400,000 wireless
customers in one 24-hour period could
not access the wireless data network.
They could not download a ring-
tone, visit a website, or send a short
message an estimated $4.8 to $7.2M
of lost revenue for the provider. The
operator also discovered that many of
these customers were denied network
access, not because of network
problems, but because they had not
purchased the right to use data services
in their service plan.
Acting on Analysis
Every customer interaction or service
usage creates data that can be
captured and analyzed to continually
rene segmentation models, customer
proles, buying behaviors, purchase
propensities, network performance
and business processes that enhance
the customer experience. A well-
implemented information management
strategy combined with a powerful
set of analytical capabilities enables a
provider to exploit the inherent value
of data to continually improve the
customer experience. Throughout
the customer lifecycle targeting and
marketing, acquisition, service usage
and support, key lines of business play
a critical role in planning, managing and
supporting the customer experience.
Each line of business has unique
opportunities to translate analytical
insight into actions to impact customer
experience. In many instances, analytical
models and results can automatically
be incorporated into customer lifecycle
processes to enhance customer
experience.
Service Provider Benets from AnalyticsDriven Customer Experience Management
Customer Lifecycle Provides a Wealth of Insight
Aggregate, Analyze and Act to Optimize the Customer Experience
55 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
Targeting and Marketing
Product Management
Assess product acceptance and
protability via accurate and current
sales reports that enable granular
analysis, and augment product
strategy accordingly.
Gauge market sentiment by analyzing
web and social media to identify
product gaps or previously
unrecognized market opportunities.
Develop products and services more
closely aligned with market segments
though analysis of CSR logs and
customer correspondence.
Apply predictive analytics to
determine buying propensities and
optimize product features or service
bundles.
Marketing
Analyze customer sentiment via
surveys, CSR logs, blogs, social
media and email to more closely
align products/services with market
segments, thereby lowering marketing
and customer acquisition costs.
Develop customer lifetime value
models to guide marketing decisions
and customer interactions throughout
lifecycle.
Reduce campaign costs and achieve
better campaign results via more
accurate customer proling and offer
targeting.
Monitor campaign results in real-
time to improve accuracy of customer
proles and increase offer acceptance.
Develop predictive churn models that
guide offers and customer interaction,
and are enhanced via continual
analysis of customer, product and
network data.
Acquisition
Sales
Improve data quality and integration to
facilitate accurate capture of customer
and product information to facilitate
efcient interaction throughout the
customer lifecycle.
Apply customer proles and purchase
propensity models in the order
process to recommend appropriate
cross-sell/up-sell offers.
Employ business process
management to accelerate order,
fulllment and provisioning, using
business activity monitoring to assess
the on-going quality and efciency of
the process.
Operations
Extend data quality and process
efciency established in the order
process to the fulllment, provision
and billing processes to signicantly
reduce order fall out and accelerate
activation time.
Service Support
Customer Service
Employ CLV models for customer
segments and continually rene
models via aggregation and analysis
of customer transactions; use
CLV models to prioritize and guide
customer service.
Develop predictive models to advise
next best action based upon context
of offer, appropriate channel and
purchase propensity. Continually
rene predictive models on basis of
NBA results.
Analyze CSR logs and email to reveal
frequently occurring questions that
could be answered more efciently via
self-service or improved CSR scripts.
Operations
Monitor network performance down
to the device level in real-time. In the
event of fault automatically notify
customer via appropriate channel and
offer compensation designed to retain
protable customers.
Continually assess network
performance to identify areas that
may require infrastructure upgrades to
accommodate increased demand for
capacity.
Use historical operational data to
develop predictive maintenance
models to extend asset life and
minimize maintenance costs.
Summary and Recommendations
The true value of analytics cannot be
fully achieved without an enterprise
strategy that provides accurate,
consistent and current information to
enable line of business insight, and a
service provider delivery environment
to facilitate translation of analytics
into action throughout the customer
lifecycle. Aggregation of relevant data/
information, application of rich set of
analytical capabilities for structured
and unstructured information, as well
as real-time analytics to effectively
process massive volumes of network
data can enable providers to achieve
a signicantly better understanding
of market, customers, products and
services. This understanding, when
acted upon and incorporated into key
processes of the customer lifecycle,
has signicant potential to optimize
the customer experience while
simultaneously improving enterprise
efciency.
56 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
Around the world Communications Service Providers (CSPs) confront the same challenge. They
collect, process, and store enormous quantities of unique and varied customer data data that
could give them much deeper insight into the total customer experience. Indeed, many industry
insiders and observers believe that customer data, not the network, is a CSPs most important
asset the crown jewel. However, most CSPs undervalue customer data, and therefore are
not fully leveraging it to their advantage. As the global leader in Business Analytics, SAS is
helping over 200 CSPs get more value out of their data to improve all aspects of the customer
experience.
The Paradox facing the
Communications Service Providers
Customers enjoy more choices today
than they could have been imagined
just a few years ago. They delight in
personalizing devices and services to
suit their unique needs and preferences.
Both consumers and business
customers now demand greater control
and exibility. To satisfy this demand,
CSPs now offer an expanded product
catalog accessible through self-service
portals. However, offering more options
inevitably leads to a more complex
operating environment that makes it
more difcult and costly to ensure a
high quality experience.
But customers also complain that
the number of available options leaves
them confused about the technology,
services, and the value they receive for
their money. This is the paradox faced
by CSPs today. To thrive in todays
market you must deliver a high quality
experience, but increasing the number
of services and options makes it harder
to ensure that all customers have that
quality experience.
Business Analytics offers a proven
antidote to this paradox and many
Using Analytically Driven Insight
for Competitive Advantage
successful network operators are
leveraging it today for competitive
advantage. Success in todays highly
competitive marketplace is a function
of the quality of customer data and
how quickly and efciently a company
can leverage that data to drive better
decision making. The competitive edge
goes to the CSP who invests in deeper
customer insight and then mindfully
choreographs customer interactions
tailored to each individual.
Proving the Value of Business
Analytics
CSPs began using analytical software
decades ago. SAS has worked with
network operators around the globe to
complement OSS and BSS functions
by performing such tasks as network
capacity planning, demand forecasting,
customer segmentation, network
and service optimization, protability
analysis, marketing optimization, and
many other functions. For most of
that time, analytics was the domain of
statisticians and data modelers. That
changed about a decade ago when high
churn rates threatened the survival of
many wireless operators.
Across the industry, churn rates
are now about half what they were
ten years ago, when many operators
routinely posted monthly churn rates
above 3% for their post-paid customers.
Too often, the cost to acquire a
customer was not recovered before the
customer terminated the relationship.
As markets became saturated leaving
fewer new customers to acquire, senior
executives became alarmed at the high
churn rates.
Analytical models identify the
customers most likely to leave.
Retention activities are then proactively
directed at those customers. CSPs
became better at identifying the drivers
of churn so they could prioritize and
execute corrective actions, while
remaining with their budgets. More
impressively, the operators who relied
on analytic insight were able to reduce
churn while maintaining or even raising
ARPU, becoming far more protable
than their less analytically inclined
competitors who resorted to price cuts
and giveaways.
For many operators, this highly-visible
validation of the benets of analytics on
business performance convinced many
57 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
senior executives that strategic use of
analytics has a much higher return on
investment than other options.
Innovations that Increase Customer
Protability
As the value of business analytics
became clearer, network operators
became highly innovative and varied in
their use of analytics. Many operators
now consider their analytic applications
as key intellectual property and a source
of competitive differentiation.
Customer segmentation at leading
CSPs is now a highly sophisticated
and essential business function
that considers how customers use
communications services. For many
years CSP s only segmented customers
as either business or residential. Later,
simplistic demographic segmentation
variables such as age, income,
geography, and gender were adopted.
More advanced approaches in use today
include behavior based variables that
tell a CSP how the customer is using
services, the cost to serve, and the
lifetime value of the customer. The
result is that a CSP can better classify
customers, have more protable
engagements, and improve the ROI on
campaigns.
CSPs can also greatly enhance their
segmentation models by inferring
and leveraging the inuence that an
individual has over other customers.
Analytics can give marketers the
tools and know-how to create more
cost-effective marketing campaigns,
reduce customer attrition by attracting
inuencers, and provide more relevant
content in their marketing messages.
Users can quickly visualize social
networks between their customers
that were previously unknown to
uncover leaders, followers, and other
members within social communities.
By incorporating such role-based
variables, a CSP can enhance existing
segmentation models, and discover
how and when to target inuencers.
In addition, marketers are able to
understand how products and ideas
diffuse through entire networks, thus
allowing tests of new campaigns which
would optimize the spread of new
products or services to their customers.
Customers frequently express
difculty in understanding the various
price plans and options offered by their
service provider. Furthermore, many
customers believe that a different plan
would have resulted in a lower bill. Price
plan dissatisfaction is a leading reason
for customer churn. Business analytics
offers an efcient and effective solution
by calculating the optimal offer for each
customer in advance of a customer
interaction via a highly efcient method.
Simulating an individual customers bill
under any number of price plans can
give operators a precise, analytically-
driven, prioritized list of offers that
balance the customers desire to
reduce cost with the operators need to
maximize prots.
Where this is leading is to a
breakdown of the traditional
mass marketing model and the
establishment of a marketing model
thats customer-centered and
personalized. As noted by independent
research rm, Forrester Research,
Inc., Only 13% of consumers say
that the ads they see are relevant to
their wants and needs, and even fewer
nd direct mail and e-mail marketing
relevant. Consumers have had enough
of marketing, and more than three-
quarters say they want companies to
let them decide how a company can
communicate with them.
In other words, consumers want to be
in the drivers seat. They also expect a
consistent experience with their service
providers across channels. And, they
want a dialogue with the companies
one that clearly demonstrates
employees take into account what the
business already knows about them.
To do this, a CSP needs to leverage the
customer data explosion for competitive
advantage. Rather than just using the
same syndicated data available to
competitors, a CSP can create unique
analytical insight about customers
and prospects based on how they use
communications services, what they
are buying, their location, how they
use websites and mobile applications,
their social media interactions and
more. They can then choreograph their
interactions based on this insight.
The Need for an Analytics
Architecture and the Role of the
TMForum
As valuable as analytics have proven
to be, one might expect all CSPs to be
advanced user of business analytics, but
this is rarely the case. Most business
and IT executives of major CSPs admit
that they are not making the best use
58 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
of all the data they collect and store.
The challenge, according to the CIO of
one of the largest US communications
service providers, is that multiple
customer data warehouses, silos of
information, and competing strategies
across service lines and divisions
prevent delivery of a more strategic,
holistic approach to customer
intelligence.
CSPs need a standardized approach
to data modeling for business
analytics just as they do for OSS and
BSS applications. The TM Forums
Information Framework (SID) offers the
industrys best business architecture
for analytical applications. SAS has
invested signicant R&D resources in an
analytic architecture that is aligned with
the SID. As the Forum increases the
focus on analytics, SASs customers will
be assured of easier and more effective
integration between systems.
Conclusion
When used to its full potential, business
analytics removes complexity from
decision making at all levels of the
organization. Speed, precision, and
efciency of decision-making will
determine if a CSP can deliver the
quality of experience that customers
expect. To meet this challenge, the
most competitive CSPs in the world
are migrating analytics from the back
ofce up to the C-suite and out to every
decision point in the organization.
THE SAS
DIFFERENCE
SAS proven software, services and best
practices offer communications industry
specic solutions, data management,
customer analytics, forecasting and
optimization to improve the customer
experience, business performance and
prots:
Superior data management. SAS lets
you extract data from nearly any
source and transform it, as well as
integrate data from third parties and
across business and service lines for a
holistic customer view.
A communications-specic customer
data model optimized for analytics
and aligned with the TM Forums
Information Framework (SID). An
optional communications data model
addresses segmentation, cross-sell/
up-sell, and churn.
Powerful analytics. Data and text
mining and detailed segmentation/
proling (churn analysis, market
basket analysis, customer protability,
response modeling, next-best activity
modeling, etc.) help you understand
and predict customer behavior.
Social inuence analysis. Identify
social communities and measure
social inuence based on relationships
between customers using role-
based variables to enhance existing
segmentation models and discover
how best to target inuencers.
Critical early-warning alerts. Only SAS
lets you establish triggers that send
early warning alerts automatically
when a key customers behavior
is about to change so you can
intervene early enough to make a
difference.
Cost and protability analysis.
Calculate cost and protability of
activities tied to campaigns as well
as customer, channel and product
protability.
Patented optimization. Our patented
algorithm is more precise and
exible can be applied to many
business activities, such as marketing
campaigns, resource planning and
allocations. Multiple weighted
objectives can be built in the model
for optimal results.
Only SAS provides an evolutionary
growth path that lets you address your
most critical business issues rst, then
add new functionality over time as your
needs change.
Learn more at www.sas.com/success.
Using Analytically Driven Insight
for Competitive Advantage
59 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
The term analytics is trendy. As the
term becomes more widely used its
meaning is sometimes obscured.
Analytics cannot be asked as a binary
question, as in does a product
support analytics? We have to think
of analytic applications as a spectrum of
offerings with different capabilities for
different tasks.
Plotting the spectrum of analytic
applications on a graph, with
Competitive Advantage along the Y axis
and Degree of Intelligence along the
X axis, we can see that as the degree
of intelligence increases, so does the
competitive advantage. We can also
divide these analytic applications into
those looking only at the past (green
spheres) and those that predict future
outcomes (blue spheres).
At a very low level, are standard
reports that answer the question, What
happened? Financial reports generated
on a regular basis are a good example.
They answer questions such as How
many new customers signed-up last
quarter? or What was our churn rate
and ARPU? or Which devices are
selling best?
Ad hoc reports are for special
situations such as asking What were
the results of a one-time promotion? or
How did that code x impact network
performance?
Query drilldown capability such as
OLAP enables deeper discovery, for
example, if handset returns are on the
rise, an analyst can look at a geographic
breakdown in search of a pattern.
Alerts are very useful in bringing
attention to a problem area. A good
example could be changing a dashboard
indicator from green to yellow and nally
red as a problem is developing.
All four of the above applications look
only at what already happened. These
applications are essential to keep the
business operating, but reveal nothing
about whats likely to happen in the
future. That is farther up the spectrum.
Statistical analysis can answer the
questions, Why is this happening?
and What factors most contribute
to network degradation? Data and
text mining can be used to identify
correlations which may illuminate an
early indication of developing trends.
Forecasting helps CSPs more
accurately plan for changing conditions
by address the question What if
these trends continue? More accurate
forecasts can offer a clear picture of
things like future bandwidth demands,
customer churn rates, or the minimum
number of handsets to have in stock.
Predictive modeling can help answer,
What will happen next? For example,
when offering a new service predictive
modeling can identify which customers
are most likely to respond. Or it can
identify the customers most likely to
leave.
Finally we have optimization, which
tells How do we do things better? or
How do we best align our resources to
achieve our objectives?
The applications at the top of the
spectrum deliver the most value. As
CSPs face intense competition in a
rapidly changing marketplace, they need
analytics that span the full spectrum.
Analytics Dened
60 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
The one who sends the (data service) bill,
owns the (data service) problem
Data, data everywhere:
The wireless industry passed an
interesting crossover milestone
late last year, but with surprisingly
little fanfare from press and analysts:
Ericsson reported that for the rst time
ever, in December 2009, worldwide
mobile data trafc exceeded mobile
voice data trafc. gure 1.
More recently, in their US Wireless
Data Market Q2 2010 Update (1),
Chetan Sharma Consulting predicted
that on the current trajectory, the
next major crossover data ARPU
exceeding voice ARPU would occur in
the US market in Q2 2013. gure 2.
Lets put these dry statistics into
hard business terms: Within the next
36 months, your mobile data customer
will be more important to your business
than your mobile voice customer. This
change is inevitable and irreversible.
For a wireless operator to be
successful in this new era, they have to
recognize that this is a highly disruptive
change that cannot be addressed
by ne-tuning existing management
tools and processes. Instead of being
Figure 1 Figure 2
organizations driven primarily by one
type of customer needs (reliable point-
to-point voice communication within a
proprietary network), wireless operators
will be driven by an entirely new set of
customer needs (ubiquitous, seamless
access to applications and content
of their choosing across an open,
worldwide network the Internet).
Using yesterdays solutions to solve
todays and tomorrows problems?
One of the key processes that will
distinguish the major players from
the also-rans in the new, data-
driven operator world is the way that
they manage the user experience of
their service to ensure a protable
and loyal customer relationship. The
traditional solutions used for decades
by xed and mobile operators to
manage voice services simply dont
work when it comes to managing
mobile data services. There are a
number of reasons for this: Unlike
voice services, mobile data services
are not conned to end points within
the mobile operators walled garden
by Sean Timiney, Director, Mobile Solutions, Compuware and former Manager, Mobile Data Services, Sprint
(their own network); non telco vendors
are heavily inuencing user behavior
and expectations with a myriad of
innovative devices and applications;
and there is a whole new generation of
users that are impatient, unencumbered
with antiquated notions such as brand
loyalty, and who expect things to just
work.
Within the next 36 months, your
mobile data customer will be
more important to your business
than your mobile voice customer.
This change is inevitable and
irreversible.
61 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
The major problem thats being
exposed inside almost every operator is
that theres a deep disconnect between
what the operator thinks is happening
on the data network, and what the end
user is actually experiencing:
- On the one hand, the operators
visibility is conned to one part of the
service delivery chain (the network),
and with limited or no visibility into
other parts of the delivery chain
(device, application, etc). gure 3. In the
absence of any other data, when all
lights are green on the network, the
assumption can only be that we think
all is well with our users.
- On the other hand, the end user is
continuously experiencing the entire
service delivery chain (including any
problems), and perceives the mobile
data service as a single entity provided
by the operator. So, rightly or wrongly,
end users will hold the operator
accountable for any problems without
consideration for who in the service
delivery chain is actually to blame.
In other words, operators are in the
awkward position of not having full
visibility into the service delivery chain
that their customers are using, while
still being expected to assure that the
customer has a good experience.
Disruptive problems demand
innovative solutions:
At the heart of the problem facing
operators as they transition from a
voice-centric to a data-centric business
is the fact that there is a rapidly
widening gap between the operators
view of their mobile data service quality
and the actual end-user experience of
the service.
The only way to narrow (and
ultimately eliminate) this gap is for
the operator to adopt an innovative
Service Performance Management
approach: manage mobile data services
by managing the entire service delivery
chain, not just the elements that are
under the operators direct control.
gure 4. The approach goes way
beyond just implementing the latest
and greatest visibility management
software tools; it also includes aligning
departments within the organization,
and even managing the customer
Figure 3
Figure 4
End users will hold the operator
accountable for any problems
without consideration for who
in the service delivery chain is
actually to blame.
experience before they actually become
a customer. Although this approach may
be new inside the operators business,
it is actually a tried-and-tested approach
that has been successfully employed
in a large number of enterprises to
manage the delivery of their IT services
for internal users and customers. In
fact, the problems faced by these
enterprises are remarkably similar to
the problems that operators now face in
delivering data services to their users.
62 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
The one who sends the (data service) bill,
owns the (data service) problem
The Service Performance Management approach denes 4 key principles:
i) Unite at the customer: The traditional silo-focused departments within the operator must unite at the customer. This
means that each department must communicate problems across departmental boundaries, and always in terms of what the
problems mean to the customer. For instance, if Engineering detects that Cell Tower 123A is operating at reduced throughput
because of an electronics failure, they must communicate this to other departments as Customers in postal code 34017 may
be experiencing slow performance for the next 2 hours. This enables customer-facing departments to respond quickly and
accurately to customer calls, to post information to a customer performance website, or even to proactively notify affected
users in that area via SMS.
ii) Create a customer experience ecosystem: True end-user-focused service management requires a unied ecosystem of
people, responsibilities, processes and tools inside the operator to nd and x problems quickly. Without this, operators are
unwittingly putting their customers at the forefront of problem detection, since all too often, the rst time the operator knows
of a problem is when the customer calls to complain. The customer experience eco-system brings together disparate parts of
the organization by providing one view of the truth aligned to a clear line of responsibility, which enables them to identify and
solve the right problem with the right people, as opposed to debating if the problem actually exists or who owns it.
iii) Develop an outside-in view of your business: Although it is frequently overlooked, the outside-in view of the
customer experience is an important part of building a competitive offer and a protable, long-term relationship with
customers. It starts with real-time monitoring of the performance of the operators own website from outside the organization
(the customers point-of-view), and so includes content from a number of partner sites. If any of the partner sites are
performing badly, it will look to the customer (or prospective customer) as though the operators website is slow. Even more
important, outside-in performance monitoring should include monitoring of the performance of customers most important
applications and services (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Google, the operators website, etc.) over both the operators network and
their competitors networks. Using the collective intelligence gained from outside-in monitoring, very valuable customer
data can be obtained. For instance, is the operator providing a better, or worse, experience with device A on Facebook
than a competitor using device B? It also allows the operator to determine what devices are most popular on the network,
irrespective of who actually sold the device (e.g. including roaming-in users and unlocked devices).
iv) Develop a real-time, end-user experience view of data service performance: The vast majority of the mobile data trafc
handled by the operator is to/from services and websites which reside outside the operators own network, somewhere on
the Internet the operator is simply part of an extended service delivery chain. A real-time, end-user experience view of data
service performance allows the operator to gain visibility into the performance of the entire service delivery chain: the device,
application, network and content that make up the mobile data service for the user. With this visibility, the operator can now
view these service delivery segments from the perspective of the end user. With real-time and continuous monitoring of the
service delivery chain, the operator gains the ability to proactively identify and resolve service experience issues before they
become impediments to individual user perception of the service.
63 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
Compuware puts it all together:
In response to requests from many
operators around the world, Compuware
developed the vision of Proactive
Customer Awareness (PCA). This
incorporates the Service Performance
Management approach described above,
plus it uses a phased implementation
methodology which denes three major
milestones as shown. gure 5
This is the approach that carriers
around the world are adopting as their
strategic direction and deployment
methodology to achieve their business
goals. Compuwares PCA vision also
recognizes that operators have a
signicant investment in existing tools
and processes, so it offers the ability to
leverage those whenever possible.
Compuwares PCA solution builds
a new foundation for managing and
growing high-performance customer
data experience. It combines our
market leadership in enterprise end-user
experience management (the Vantage
product line) with our market leadership
in outside-in web performance
management (Gomez) to deliver a truly
unique, end-to-end solution to manage the
data service experience.
Conclusion:
As mobile operators become increasingly
dependent on data services for revenue
and margin, they are faced with the fact
that their existing network management
tools and operational processes are unable
to meet the needs and expectations of
this new era. There is only one solution:
Re-focus the organization to unite around
the customer, not just the network. This
requires working with a vendor that has
the operational experience in a number
of areas, such as end-user experience
management, website performance
management and service delivery
management.
Compuware has extensive,
demonstrable experience in all three
areas: It pioneered end-user experience
management of data applications in the
enterprise; it has been helping businesses
manage the delivery of mission-critical
services for over three decades; and
Gomez, our web performance division,
provides the worlds most comprehensive
testing network, covering every logical
and physical layer of the web application
delivery chain. Compuware has expanded
this industry-proven approach to managing
mobile data services, and is now helping
global mobile operators achieve success in
managing protable mobile data services.
Compuwares solution is more than just
adding more tools. It is an approach to
help mobilize the departments involved in
service delivery, leverage existing tools,
improve processes, and use innovative
tools that help deliver maximum user
experience on mobile data services to
ensure a loyal, protable relationship with
your customers.
Figure 5
References:
(1) www.chetansharma.com:
Report US Mobile Data Market Update Q2 2010
64 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
Closing down the Customer Experience
Gap and Safeguarding against Churn
Arantech have taken a radically different
approach to the BSS and OSS market
compared to existing vendors, by building
a system that puts the customer at the
heart of its architecture.
Todays operators must embrace
customer advocacy service models if
they are to gain new users, drive up
ARPU and increase customer lifetime
value. Such service models, which are
geared to helping customers achieve their
objectives, require operators to co-create
value along with their customers through
effective business support systems (BSS).
Customer experience management
(CEM) is an increasingly important
element of the OSS function of many
telcos, but the potential that CEM
systems offer in terms of the BSS
function is still to be realised. Finding
ways for BSS to effectively use real-
time, point-of-use CEM data offers
signicant benets for operators to map
performance objectives, identify next best
action (NBA) strategies and build accurate
churn propensity models.
The following article considers the
issues faced as operators migrate to
customer advocacy models, look at the
requirements for a customer advocacy-
orientated BSS, identify how CEM data
can help to address those requirements
and discuss ways that this data can be
effectively mined by the BSS function.
Safeguarding themselves against
churn and ARPU decline has become
a key objective for the mobile operator.
However, in attempting to identify
churn rates in different sections of the
subscriber base, the operator is faced
with some difcult problems they must
deal with a lot of information coming from
disparate elements of the network, and
they do not have an understanding or
vision of how to interpret this information.
Reference, Figure 1.1 Stop Churn.
CEM delivers a unique, new dataset
that provides an operator deeper insight
into its entire customer experience
and behavior, especially the real-time
experience of data and other services.
In putting together a coherent strategy
to overcome potential churn problems,
Arantech suggests that the operator asks
the following questions;
What information is required?
If we believe what the analysts are
telling us, we are seeing a churn factor or
industry standard of 30-35% churn. Given
this, the operator needs to understand
what the level of churn is on their
network, and conrm whether they are
within the industry norms.
The operator must out the rate of
churn, identify higher or lower rates in
specic groups, and discover what are
the inuences on these groups and what
can they do to reduce or strengthen
this inuence. They will also need to
understand what return is being sought
from the marketing activities that they
deploy to affect the rates of churn.
What are we looking for?
The operator should start to look at the
subscribers who are at a higher risk of
churning from pressures such as bill
shock or other bad experiences like
dropped call rates. Subscribers coming
to the end of their contracts are also in
this high-risk category. The operator must
analyze the customer base to nd these
high-risk subscribers.
We would advise that they start to
look beyond typical market research to
segment the customer base. Operators
cannot afford to keep using traditional
demographic or attitudinal segmentations
to make decisions about differential
treatment of existing customers. It is not
enough, for example, for an organization
to target the youth segment, because
this group encompasses customers
with a wide range of usage and spend
patterns, and its members may not be
accurately identiable in the rst place.
Instead, the operator could create
micro-segments that provide a closer
view of customer types and vary by value
driver. These micro-segments can be
developed incrementally using subscriber
information. This is data that very likely
already exists on various databases
throughout the organization such as
Customer Experience Indicators (CEIs), or
Customer Data Records. (CDRs).
Getting this data into a single data mart is
the rst step; from there, it can be groomed,
updated, and redeployed to all the key areas
Figure 1.1 Stop Churn
65 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
of customer contact, including call centers,
retail outlets, and the operators Web site.
As more data is gathered and updated, its
usefulness and value grows.
If the operator can do this, they may
be able to quantify the lifetime value of
each subscriber and start to do things like
de-averaging customer segments and
offers. This is where they are not making
offers to an entire segment, which may
contain millions of subscribers, but instead
make focused, targeted offers to more
precise groups, thereby achieving a higher
yield from these activities.
The operator also needs to understand
propensity & pressure to churn. This can
be viewed in the form of a social network.
A typical user will be at the center of
a social network that includes their
family and colleagues. If they have a bad
experience, this will have an inuence on
the network by increasing the propensity
for churn. The factors for this inuence
will vary according to the strength of the
connections in the network.
The operator needs to understand that,
despite having identied the groups of
subscribers and key subscribers that they
want to focus on, they will have a very
limited time in which they can reverse the
effects of a bad experience. This window
is a key factor in managing a churn
reduction program. Understanding this
window and the duration that they have to
respond for each group of subscribers will
be an important consideration.
Subscriber Protability
Once the customer base has been
segmented and the churn pressures are
understood, the operator needs to evaluate
the results and focus on a group that
they feel will produce a meaningful return
or yield from the preventative measures.
We would advise the operator to look
at some of the following factors to build a
set of thresholds or levels that will dene
when the subscriber becomes protable.
1. Age Analysis This is contract
information that can be extracted from
a third party. This is also called the
FICO score or credit score. The data
can be imported from agencies such
as Experian, Equifax or TransUnion.
Injecting the FICO scores use third
party analysis to look at the risk factors,
but this will have to be referenced by
something like a social security number.
2. Billing History Payment history
means a number of different things. It
means more than just a history of the
subscriber paying on time, although
that is important. If they pay 30 days
late or 60 days late, that is recorded and
can build the propensity analysis. Even
a single late payment can dramatically
lower this rating.
3. ARPU Analysis This can be split into
two elements, the tarifng element
and the cost element. The tarifng is
the package the subscriber is on and
this can vary according to the needs
of the market. Data tariffs associated
with a handset such as the iPhone
can vary signicantly with that of a
basic package. The cost elements
can be associated with the region the
subscriber is based in and can include
costs of an urban area such as backhaul,
spectrum, etc. as compared to a rural
cost basis.
4. Contract Duration - The average age
of an account with the operator is also a
factor in propensity rating. For example,
subscribers with a long history of good
use and prompt payment with a low
cost of retention allows operators to
rate accordingly.
The operator now has built a rating
engine for his subscribers and they
can now assess the desirability of the
subscriber that has the propensity to
churn from a nancial perspective. This
will enable the operator to focus on the
retention of the more desirable subscribers.
Customer Satisfaction Index
The operator is now in a position to build
a model that will enable him to take a
ltered group of subscribers and focus
on their satisfaction with the operator as
a service provider.
We would advise the operator to build
a Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) to
monitor these ltered subscribers. There
are ranges of inputs or KPIs that form
the CSI. We have suggested some of the
KPIs and measures that form the CSI -
they can include the following;
1. Commercial Data This can be a
summary of the protability data
as described above or it can be the
rating that is currently used by the
care agents in the customer care data
associated with the subscriber.
2. Network Experience for Voice
& Data Using a CSI to identify the
network issues affecting subscribers
can drive key metrics such as network
attach success rates from 70% to
over 90% (based on existing Arantech
customers).
3. Service Usage for Voice & Data It
has become more and more difcult
for an operator to measure exactly
how individual services are being
used by subscribers, and how each
of these services are contributing to
overall revenues. A CEM solution such
as Arantechs can provide key usage
metrics for us in an overall CSI.
4. Customer Complaints If the
subscriber has called the operator to
make a complaint or highlight a problem
when linked to the experience or service,
this can present the operator with a
very real picture of the problem for rapid
resolution and/or monitoring. We have
seen this used to great effect in the
management of VIPs and for large events
such as sporting xtures.
66 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
Closing down the Customer Experience
Gap and Safeguarding against Churn
5. Survey Responses If we add survey
responses to this index we get an
understanding of the average levels for
the CSI. An example of this would be in
the use of an outbound survey on the
levels of survey from a new handset.
The results can be fed into the CSI for
each subscriber surveyed and this can
be aggregated to see if the desired or
expected levels are being achieved.
The CSI is very effective in
understanding where the satisfaction
level is for the selected subscribers and
where the potential issues are and what
may have in an inuence on this across
the network or handset.
Decision Engine
The nal element of this process is the
decision engine. Now that the operator
has decided on and is monitoring this
group of subscribers he next needs to
decide how he is going to respond to the
issues that are highlighted in the CSI.
1. Intervention Strategy The positive
effect of a care agent calling a
subscriber to tell them of a problem
with the network or their specic
service is very powerful and can
have a very strong impact on the
pressures and inuences to churn. The
intervention strategy can be some form
of credit or gift that is in line with the
decision of the marketing function. The
reality of this situation is now that the
operator can monitor the effects of the
intervention strategy in real-time or
something very close to it.
2. Closed Loop Capability The ability
to automatically identify, process
and respond to customer and
network events in a meaningful way
in real-time is critical in identifying
negative experience scenarios
and to proactively address user
experience issues as they arise. For
example, Arantechs OpenPlatform
ProAction solution has had proven
success in greatly reducing customer
care calls and ensuring that revenue-
generating services continue to be
available and usable.
Now that the operator has all the
elements in place, they will be in a
position to greatly increase their ability in
predicting churn in their network.
Arantech have also seen that if
the operator can maintain customer
satisfaction among a group of protable
subscribers, this will have a positive
impact on free cash ows as the operator
will generate more cash from operations
and use their infrastructure much more
efciently, thereby generating higher free
cash ows.
The difference between what a
customer actually experiences and
what can be currently measured by the
operator using existing tools is called
the customer experience gap. See
Figure 1.2 The Customer Experience
Gap. This gap is measurable and present
in most telecommunications networks
and is growing rapidly in the area of data
services. Identifying and closing this gap
will be a key factor in the future success
of any mobile and xed line operator. The
ability to identify the poor experiences
of its users, and act on the outcomes
automatically is key and will result in
higher levels of customer retention,
advocacy and greater revenues, leading to
market share gains over rival operators.
CEM systems are designed specically
to identify and close this experience gap
as well as gain deeper customer insight
into experience and take actions on
customer events. Using CEM systems,
operators will be able to understand how
subscribers interact with their services in
real-time and be able to respond to issues
that cannot easily be uncovered by OSS
KPIs or existing data stored across the
business (e.g. CDRs).
Most customer insight, experience
and behaviour knowledge is currently
gained through data mining exercises
against existing data sources already
stored within the BSS environment. This
exercise entails sifting through enormous
quantities of data in an attempt to rebuild
the customers experiences over time
(typically CDR and usage data is used
from data warehousing solutions). Very
little, if any, OSS network transactional
data is stored and available for this
purpose, as this data is usually kept
within the monitoring tools to enable
session and protocol level analysis to
help root cause and problem diagnosis of
services and the network. This means the
customer usage experience is missing
from most customer insight analysis in
BSS. Trying to make such large volumes
of raw transaction OSS data available
into Business Intelligence tools would be
extremely difcult for three key reasons
( a) the cost of storage for such data
volumes would be restrictive (b) the data
would be uncorrelated with customer id
and other useful index types (e.g. handset
device and service node), requiring huge
post processing queries and the need to
correlate with other data sources and (c)
the knowledge required to build sensible
data queries of such low level data would
make using the solution impossible for
anybody other than a protocol expert.) Figure 1.2 The Customer Experience Gap
67 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
The uniqueness of a transactional based
CEM solution is that it can make this
experience data available and combine
it with BSS datasets. The system builds
in real-time a set of new KPIs from the
raw protocol ows across many business
and operational touchpoints, creating a
unique customer centric data set that
reects actual experience and is customer
specic. This process both links important
index types to service KPIs at aggregation
time and also removes the need to store
unwanted and irrelevant data which is
dropped after the CEIs are built, retaining
only those errored events and experience
counts that dene a customers experience
at that time. Each customer therefore has
an experience record in near real-time in
the database, such data can be congured
in real-time by the operator into experience
threads against exible or a dynamic group
of individuals and reported against using
standard Business Intelligence software,
dashboarding and reporting techniques
to provide deep customer insight. This
data can also be made available to other
standard BI tools or applications through
solutions (such as Arantechs touchpoint
OpenPlatform
TM
), which includes a
Datamart and a rules based action engine.
The Arantech Approach
Arantech was one of the rst companies
that pioneered the use of CEM as
a technology within the telecom
industry, and has successfully delivered
its agship CEM solution called
touchpoint
TM
into some of the worlds
largest mobile operator groups. Through
its touchpoint
TM
product offering and
OpenPlatform interfaces it has
been able to take raw event data from
the network and model the underlying
protocols as useful customer KPIs
allowing this to be cross referenced with
customer relationship and demographic
information held within the operators
BSS stack. This gives a unique
perspective of the subscriber lifecycle
that helps the operator achieve higher
levels of customer satisfaction and the
ability to proactively reduce churn.
Founded in 1999, Arantech is
the premier provider of Customer
Experience Management (CEM)
systems to communications service
providers worldwide.
Arantechs CEM solution radically
transforms not only the way that
operators service their customers but
also the way their internal organisations
respond to customer needs. This has
made touchpoint both a catalyst for
cultural change and a transformational
force for its customers in terms of
revenue and operational practice, or
network issues. touchpoint provides
a simple proactive approach to rst-line
customer management and selling,
supporting any network, service or
device type, through its touchpoint
360 desktop portal. It also enables
tight integration via APIs to other BSS
and OSS systems like customer care,
service management, and performance
management, providing these systems
with a high level of customer centric
capability.
Arantechs CEM solutions provide
mobile operators with a unique
customer insight, and enable them to
take proactive management action on
real-time experience events.
touchpoint OpenPlatform recently
launched by Arantech opens up access
to the touchpoint data through open
access protocols such as web services
and SOA, giving access to CEM data
to a broader range of stakeholders
and third party application vendors.
This enables operators and third party
application vendors, to drive-and-derive
the benets and value of CEM data
throughout their organisation.
Arantech is the customer experience
management specialist within the
wireless industry, and is actively
broadening its reach into other channels
of digital service delivery, such as xed-
line broadband and mobile convergence.
See Figure 1.3 Converged CEM View.
For more information, visit
www.arantech.com
Figure 1.3 Converged CEM View
68 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
Every touch point between customers
and their service providers or partners
contributes to some form of customer
perception, leading to satisfaction or
frustration, loyalty or churn and ultimately
to the protability of a service provider.
As dened by TM Forum in their 2009
Insights research report, customer
experience can be viewed as the result
of the sum of observations, perceptions,
thoughts and feelings arising from
interactions and relationships between
customers and their service provider(s).
Therefore seeking to retain and up-sell
customers, introducing a loyalty program,
attracting new subscribers, focusing
on lifetime value are all examples of
customer oriented initiatives that will
create an experience, and a trace in
both the customers mind and the
Communications Service Providers (CSP)
information systems.
It is widely accepted that Business
Intelligence has a fundamental role to
play in helping CSPs manage customer
experience by locating and extracting
these traces, this customer data, across
their entire organization, cleansing
and consolidating it, analyzing it and
nally making it available to the point
of opportunity to support the right
customer impacting decision. Though the
structure of many CSPs (including silo
line-of-business and regulatory walls )
often makes it difcult for them to get a
complete and consistent representation
of all customer experiences, most
service providers have already started
their journey to incorporate analytics in
their Customer Experience Management
strategy and have achieved various levels
of success.
Where the most timid CSPs still
struggle with the accuracy or the
quality of their customer data, the most
progressive ones can already point to
tangible results, such as improvements
in rst call resolution rate or customer
retention, thanks to the effective use
of Business Intelligence in their daily
interactions with customers.
As CSPs continue to incorporate
analytics in their customer experience
management strategy, a number of new
trends have recently emerged that will
offer them new opportunities to augment
the role that Business Intelligence can
play in their organizations.
The era of Big Data
As the proliferation of connected
devices per individual continues in
mature markets, and the Machine-
to-Machine (M2M) communications
space is set to explode in the coming
decade, the pace and volume of
customer centric data accumulation
will only accelerate for CSPs. IDC
estimates that more than 1200 billion
gigabytes of information will be created
in 2010 and that this digital universe
is likely to double every 18 months.
As data sources and volume grow,
CSPs will be forced to sift through
an ever greater amounts of data,
both structured and unstructured,
to maintain successful customer
experiences.
Managing Customer Experience in a Hyper-Connected World:
The growing role of Business Intelligence
Let me do it myself
Broadband pervasiveness and new
breeds of customers such as the
digital natives who have always known
a world with an Internet connection
will continue to fuel a do it yourself
attitude and to create a growing
appetite for self-service. The customer
experience for this segment will
increasingly be dictated by his ability
to conduct business on his own terms
and to be able to nd the information
required at his ngertips. Business
Intelligence can be an integral part
of this push towards self-service and
become an experience enhancer by
providing access to personalized data
such as usage behavior, consumption
history and billing details.
A more engaged customer
The emergence of social networking
and instant communications
capabilities means that the experience
of a single customer (whether good
or average, excellent or terrible) will
increasingly shape and potentially
impact the behavior of many others.
Though some of this content may
be available in internal or external
customer satisfaction surveys, it is
by Stephan Gatien
69 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
more likely that the vast majority
of these comments will be located
in blogs, forums or social network
sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Being able to locate and transform
unstructured data or text and turn
it into valuable data for analysis
will therefore become even more
important.
A real time world
The digital experience has already
signicantly compressed the time
span of many activities in the industry.
Ordering a video on demand or
purchasing a mobile app takes only
a few seconds. Instant access is the
new form of instant gratication for a
new breed of subscribers and partners.
This tempo will increasingly dene
the expectations of customers and
dictate the tone of all facets of the
relationship with subscribers from offer
management to dispute resolution.
These trends will impact both the
behaviours and expectations of customers
as well as the complexity of a CSPs data
environment. Here are some areas that
service providers should consider:
Focus on Enterprise Information
Management
With virtually every aspect of customer
experience hinging upon the accuracy,
consistency and accessibility of data
scattered in an increasing number
of sources, the need to establish a
corporate wide trusted data foundation
has never been so critical. Therefore,
deploying an information management
solution that will provide extraction,
cleansing, enrichment, consolidation
and integration of data across the
enterprise, coupled with powerful
master and metadata management
capabilities is, more than ever,
required for CSPs. This will help
establish a trusted environment to
make better fact based decisions when
interacting with customers.
Learn and Predict
Determining the propensity of a
subscriber to churn or his propensity
to be up-sold based on attributes such
as number of devices owned, size of
household, postal code or monthly
spend can enable a much more
granular and personal conversation
with a subscriber or prospect. With
Predictive analytics, the availability
of highly sophisticated modeling and
analytic engines, allowing CSPs to
leverage their complex historical data
to establish correlations, uncover
patterns and identify trends needs to
be fully leveraged by Service Providers.
Leverage In-memory Analytics
What once represented a promising
technology is now a reality. With
the rapid decline of memory prices,
the need to store pre-calculated
data (in the form of OLAP cubes or
aggregated tables) is being eliminated.
For CSPs, this opens the door to the
possibility to browse through very
large data sets (up to billions of data
records) in seconds and effectively
deliver valuable insights during each
interaction with a customer, whether it
is around identifying the optimal offer
or better understanding the protability
of an individual customer.
Consider BI On-Demand
The BI space is clearly impacted by
the SaaS revolution. BI On-Demand
will increasingly offer a very cost-
effective way for CSPs to further
leverage Business Intelligence during
interactions with customers. CSPs
should explore how BI On Demand
solutions may help them spread the
usage of analytics at each point of
opportunity with customers and, in
doing so, further empower a broader
range of customer-facing roles in their
organizations. In addition, BI On-
Demand has the potential to become
a very cost effective pillar of any CSPs
self service strategy by enabling a
simple deployment model of access to
personalized data such as usage and
consumption patterns or billing history.
Analyze in Real Time
As highlighted earlier, the digital
economy will increasingly run in real-
time. The business implications are
obvious for CSPs. A greater level of
agility will be needed to create more
differentiation from the competition,
particularly as they interact with
customers. Gaining this extra edge will
be virtually impossible without real-
time analytics. Thanks to the advent of
technologies such as Complex Event
Processing (CEP), opportunities exist
for CSPs to operate at real-time speed
and leverage real-time insight to make
new decisions or react quickly to any
changes in their business.
Business Intelligence has a critical role
to play for Communications Service
Providers to help them manage
optimally each customer experience.
The emergence of a hyper-connected
world with a proliferation of devices per
individual and the probable explosion of
M2M communications will intensify the
need to remain customer relevant in a
growing ocean of data. Whether it is to
analyze structured or unstructured data,
on premise or on demand, in real-time or
not, CSPs should select a comprehensive
platform provider that can support them
across the different dimensions they
will require to broaden the usage of BI
in their organizations in order to enable
better customer facing or customer
impacting business decisions.
70 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
SPONSORED FEATURE
1.0 Introduction
The global telecommunications market
has become increasingly competitive
over the past half decade. Markets are
nearing (or have passed) 100 per cent
penetration and new entrants including
over the top content providers have
undermined communications service
providers (CSPs) protability and
revenue growth. CSPs recognise that
the customer data they hold is a unique
asset which they need to exploit better,
but they lack the means to do so fully.
Many CSPs have made signicant
investments in Business Intelligence
(BI) and while they have had some
successes, BI has not enabled them to
achieve the business agility they need.
CSPs need to adopt a new approach
one which gives them strategic
advantage by tracking and responding to
changing trends in customer behaviour
in real-time.
In this report we will explain how data
within business support systems (BSS)
can be exploited to enhance business
performance. We refer to this as Real-
time Actionable Intelligence. This area of
the analytics spectrum is rapidly growing
in popularity: Gartner believes that
during 2010, real-time decisioning will
be the most adopted category of analytic
application.
2.0 What is real-time actionable
intelligence?
2.1 The elements of real-time
actionable intelligence
Let us look at this in three parts:
REAL-TIME. The BI model used by most
CSPs today uses historical customer data
held in a data warehouse. While this
approach holds some value for longer-
term and predictive modelling, it cannot
help the business respond to short-term
trends.
To see how customers are behaving
and launch offers which appeal, a blend
of historical analysis and real-time
customer insight is needed.
Such real-time insight neednt be a
huge technical challenge, as BSS tools
generally include real-time capabilities.
INTELLIGENCE. The trends yielded
must facilitate some kind of business
improvement. For example, by-the-
second insight into metrics like a
customers spend from the start of the
week, or creditworthiness based on
top-up behaviour, speak volumes about
customers needs at that moment in
time.
ACTIONABLE. The ability to act is the
nal link in the chain. Here, CSPs are
often hamstrung by internal processes:
delays of several weeks between data
capture and action are commonplace.
Yet if successful retailers can manage to
ne-tune promotions day by day to get
the most prot out of each segment,
there is no reason why CSPs cannot
do the same. CSPs should know on
a daily basis who their most valuable
customers are.
2.2 Real-time actionable intelligence
in action
A common problem with pre-paid
customers is the decline in top-up and
recharge revenue towards the end of
each month. A CSP equipped with real-
time actionable intelligence could:
1. Target prepaid customers who have a
balance of less than 10 with a free
gift (say, a download) if they top-up in
the next hour
2. Offer those who dont accept an
immediate 10% bonus on their credit
instead
3. Analyse information who accepted
the promotions immediately for overall
protability
Another issue concerns capped
broadband access. Customers at their
usage limit are far more likely to churn if
they receive an offer from a competitor,
but CSPs can be proactive in making
offers of their own, and applying them
immediately, e.g.:
1. Buy a one-off 1Gbyte of usage for half
price
2. Upgrade to an unlimited plan with the
1st month free.
3.0 How will my business benet?
3.1 Long-term value from real-time
insights
The value of real-time actionable
intelligence isnt just restricted to the
CSPs own services. CSPs have a great
opportunity to market these data to third
Real-Time Intelligence,
Real-Time Value
Figure 1: Telecoms revenue growth trends 2004-2013
71 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
parties such as content providers,
brands or media planners with the CSP
providing the delivery network.
3.2 A consolidated view
One of the big reasons why BI
implementations fail is the sheer diversity
of data sources that must feed into the
system. The right real-time actionable
intelligence solution can provide a single
consolidation layer that encompasses
every potential data source. This
approach has been operationally proven
to produce signicant cost savings.
3.3 Better promotions
A recent report from Nokia Siemens
Networks for instance found that 33% of
churn could be attributed to competitors
making the right offer to other providers
customers. The ability to respond rapidly
to customer behaviour means CSPs can
pre-empt the competition.
More importantly, the customer gets
a more personalised experience a real
advantage in todays marketplace.
3.4 Wholesale and enterprise
intelligence
The need to know what is going on right
now does not just apply to retail services.
Enterprise customers in particular could
benet from real-time intelligence, for
example, monitoring employee behaviour
to tackle fraud or curb spend overruns.
Wholesale users may want a real-
time view of usage so that decisions on
dynamic pricing and routing can be made
right away.
4.0 Where does real-time actionable
intelligence sit in the BSS stack?
The logical home for real-time actionable
intelligence is the rating engine. Here,
the tools can tap into all data from all sub-
systems, manipulating it to serve a range
of purposes, as gure 2 demonstrates.
The ideal rating engine should have the
following characteristics:
Event agnostic i.e. capable of
working across all network and content
service types
Streamlined rating and billing for
wholesale transactions between
partners. This can vastly simplify
business processes and reduce costs
Able to trigger real-time events on
a per-customer basis for example
a top-up offer is only sent to prepaid
customers whose accounts meet
specic criteria
Easy integration with existing BI and
Campaign Management tools.
4.1 Deploying real-time actionable
intelligence
Convergys Smart Suite of BSS
applications takes an overlay approach
that allows the CSP to achieve a real-
time view without replacing existing BI
systems.
Following a staged approach,
CSPs can tightly link implementation
milestones to business outcomes, as
gure 3 explains.
5.0 Conclusion
The communications industry is buying
heavily into BI which, though useful in
parts, doesnt provide all the capabilities
CSPs need to remain competitive.
Convergys asserts that simplicity
must come rst. Real-time actionable
intelligence provides a basis for
improving data quality and business
performance. Most importantly, in
combination with a marketing rules
engine it provides a valuable tool to
implement actionable promotions
that maximise segment and category
protability.
Convergys Smart Suite provides the
right information at the right time so
CSPs can win customers and boost
prots, all the time.
Figure 2: Real-Time Actionable Intelligence and the BSS Stack
(source: Convergys)
With the right people and the right tools, anything is possible. Rapidly launch the
next generation of exciting business and consumer services with the support of
Convergys Smart Communications Suite powered by Microsoft. By combining
the powerful analytics capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics
Gold
recently. New offerings, tailored to the
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focus to win new customers. Flexible
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service consumption were aimed at
Capitalize on advantages of convergent real-time solution
Reduce revenue leakage to less than 0.005%
www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
targeting a new customer experience.
In addition, consolidation within the
rating and billing infrastructure needed
to provide higher efciency and to bring
down the overall TCO.
In general, performance and
capability limitations as well as the
need to prepare for the next-generation
networks and services force a strategic
decision for the future. In view of
the serious danger of losing revenue
and generating bad user experience,
operators require a short time solution,
securing a long term and convergent
roadmap in addition. The only answer
to this is one single real-time system
for pre- and postpaid customers with a
unied rating and billing environment
for all services to assure future ability
to differentiate from the competition
via tailored tariffs, innovative service
bundles and campaigns.
81
The Challenge
The targets in this strategically
important European project meant
transforming the legacy billing
infrastructure into a consolidated and
future-proof, real-time architecture.
To be ready for advanced services
in next-generation networks, the
project aimed at enhancement of
customer experience though by-passing
limitations in the existing rating and
billing systems and implementation of
new convergent service options and
bundles as well as services. Minimize
revenue leakage by improving the
rating performance, efciency and
accuracy for postpaid subscribers and
consolidating the rating and charging
environment for pre- and postpaid
subscribers and cost reduction had to
be achieved.
Implementing a fully convergent
real-time rating and billing platform
within a customers existing system
infrastructure effects the most sensible
environment that is in control of
the operators revenue stream. This
requires a detailed planned and phased
approach to guarantee uninterrupted
network operation.
The Solution
Matching all requirements for real-time
performance, convergence support
and market expertise makes Orga
Systems and OPSC
Gold enables real-time interaction
with all postpaid subscribers that use
data service bundles. With instant
notications, a new and compelling
customer experience is delivered to
the subscribers. To focus on new and
protable customer segments, the rst
true convergent offer in the market
addresses the family segment. Using
the concept of shared balances in
OPSC
Gold, a positive
return on investment was achieved in
months rather than in years.
The implementation of Orga Systems
real-time billing system OPSC
Gold
successfully ends up with managing
all subscribers in one single system.
Migrating the whole customer base and
all related tariffs enables operators to
offer more sophisticated hybrid tariffs.
Combining pre- and postpaid payment
methods for new offerings, including
promotions and loyalty campaigns
can boost brands attractiveness and
awareness.
82 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
Our Sponsors
SAS, is the global leader in business
analytics software and services. With nearly
three decades of communications industry
experience in over 200 global companies,
SAS helps CSPs to:
n Integrate the customer view to
understand the total customer experience.
n Create more targeted and granular
models based on customer insights.
n Measure protability of customers,
products, and services.
n Optimize campaigns to objectives and
factor constraints like policies/budgets.
n Preempt customer issues and improve
efciencies by analyzing QoS, network
and IT performance and service costs.
SAS gives network operators around the
world THE POWER TO KNOW
.
www.sas.com
Nokia Siemens Networks is a leading
global enabler of telecommunications
services. With its focus on innovation
and sustainability, the company provides
a complete portfolio of mobile, xed and
converged network technology, as well as
professional services including consultancy
and systems integration, deployment,
maintenance and managed services. It is
one of the largest telecommunications
hardware, software and professional
services companies in the world. Operating
in 150 countries, its headquarters are in
Espoo, Finland.
www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com
SAP for Telecommunications is a market-
leading solution that supports end-to-end
enterprise business processes for wireline,
wireless, cable, broadband, satellite, and
other multiservice operators. With 81% of
the top 500 telecommunications service
providers as a customer base and with
proven success stories, SAP provides a
compelling solution for your business.
With SAPs world class business process
platform, you can quickly adapt to market
demands and embrace new business
models in a fast changing convergent
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For more information, visit
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index.epx.
Founded in 1973, Compuware provides
software, experts and best practices to
ensure applications work well and deliver
business value. Compuware optimizes end-
to-end application performance for leading
businesses around the world, including 46
of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12
of the top 20 most-visited U.S. web sites.
In telecommunications, Compuware
combines end-user experience monitoring
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real-time subscriber intelligence capabilities
to deliver end-to-end visibility into the
customer data experience. This in-depth
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Arantechs CEM solutions provide mobile
operators with a unique customer insight, a
rich experience discovery and enables them
to take proactive management action on
real time experience events. All solutions
deliver a rapid and strong ROI by identifying
customer-centric issues (the experience
gap) in real time and enable behavioural
segmentation of a customer base which
today is not possible through existing
Business and Operational Support Systems
(B/OSS). Arantech has 39 customers
including mobile operators from four out of
the six largest mobile operator groups in the
world.
For more information visit
www.arantech.com
IBM has spent nearly $12 billion in the past
three years to deepen our capabilities in
the telecommunications industry through
a combination of internal technology
developments and strategic acquisitions
such as Micromuse, Vallent, MRO, SolidDB,
Cognos, and SPSS. IBMs Service Provider
Delivery Environment is a telecommunications
industry framework that can be used as a
blueprint to help accelerate creation and
delivery of new services, expand the partner
ecosystem, and integrate management
of services with business processes. Our
solutions, selected by over 1,000 providers and
20 of the top 20, include software, hardware,
services and research across OSS, BSS,
analytics and optimization, service delivery,
and device/asset management domains.
www.ibm.com/telecom
83 www.tmforum.org INSIGHTS RESEARCH
Empirix is the leading provider of service
quality assurance solutions for new IP
communications. Since 1992, Empirix has
led the market in innovation and expertise
for IP testing and application performance
management. Its widely acclaimed
Hammer(tm) Test Engine(tm), with patented
technology is the acknowledged global
standard for validating the quality of IP
networks, systems and applications. The
worlds largest service providers depend on
Empirixs solutions to maintain the quality
of the user experience for business-critical
voice, data, video and mobile services. With
Empirix, customers can increase revenues,
reduce customer churn and cut support
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For further information, please visit
www.empirix.com.
MDA is a global process analytic company
that enables our customers to maximize
cash from and optimize business operations;
notably the complex and critical order-
to-cash process. Through our Lavastorm
Analytic Platform and associated Adaptive
Modeling capability, we deliver powerful
solutions, such as revenue assurance,
fraud management, customer experience
analytics, service delivery analytics, trade &
settlement analytics, migration assurance,
compliance and risk analytic, and dealer
commission analytics. We deliver these
solutions in the communications, media,
energy, and utility markets, helping our
customers optimize current operations and
de-risk the transition to new products and
new business models.
www.mda-data.com
Convergys Smart Revenue Solutions
Convergys has 25 years experience
providing Smart Revenue Solutions to the
telecoms, cable, satellite, broadband, and
utilities markets. With its convergent billing
and customer care solutions, Convergys
future-proof solutions enable clients to
offer personalised, innovative services and
delivery, build customer loyalty, lower costs,
and grow revenues.
Convergys is a global leader in
relationship management enabling
leading companies in over 70 countries to
deliver exceptional customer experience.
Convergys is globally trusted and proven
in the market, reected by the fact that its
top 40 telecoms clients have been with
Convergys for more than 25 years.
www.convergys.com
With the right people and the right tools, anything is possible. Rapidly launch the
next generation of exciting business and consumer services with the support of
Convergys Smart Communications Suite powered by Microsoft. By combining
the powerful analytics capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics