Service experience matters – are operators geared up to it?

asheesh.gulati
October 10, 2012
IN: Customer experience, Mobile networks
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This blog is by Subhagata Mukherjee from the Nokia Siemens Networks Services team

Sometimes our personal experiences are the best lesson in why service experience matters. Like many of you, I am a heavy user of mobile broadband services such as browsing, video, email and social applications like Facebook. Like many of you, I live in a large city, in my case in Delhi, the capital of India, which is a country with over 900 million mobile subscribers and one of the fastest growth rates in history.

I am an enterprise customer, and my ARPU is generally at least 10 times higher than the industry average. For all these reasons, I would expect premium Quality of Service.

But I don’t always receive it. A few weeks ago, all my data services stopped working. I could not access my office or personal email accounts, the web or my social network sites. My new Nokia Lumia 800 phone suddenly regressed and became an old-time feature phone. I called the operator’s customer care agent, who was very friendly and reassuring. They immediately generated a complaint ticket and told me they would revert soon with an estimated resolution time for the problem.

During the next 2 days, I received at least six calls from various operator organizations, including customer care and the network and core teams, among others. In general, most of the calls were to verify that their respective systems were working fine: “The problem doesn’t seem to be at our end.”

Over 5 days passed. I was still in contact with various operator departments, and honestly a bit miffed and frustrated as my mobile broadband services were still not working! After 6 days, I raised the stakes and finally heard from a senior manager at the operator, who told me that the problem was with my handset and not the network. So, I basically had to wait for 7 days, without any service, only to learn that to resolve the issue I needed a software upgrade from my handset manufacturer.

After this experience, I had to wonder if there is a better and more effective way to manage the subscriber’s service experience. Isn’t there a faster process for solving service quality problems?

There is a better way
Several operators around the world have made service experience a key priority. One example is Three (3) UK. Although its network performance indicators were all good, they were fielding a growing number of customer complaints, chiefly about mobile broadband connectivity. The results of a YouGov survey of British mobile broadband users showed that these connectivity problems were having a negative impact on Three’s ranking as the top mobile broadband service provider in the UK.

So Three needed to act. They decided to establish an end-to-end service monitoring capability with the objective of reducing customer complaints related to accessibility & retainability. They wanted to understand the network KPIs and thresholds that led to these complaints

To help them achieve these goals, Nokia Siemens Networks deployed a service management process to monitor customer experience, provide detailed Service KPI dashboards, filter and correlate trouble tickets, monitor events that correlated with alarms and analyze end-to-end call flows to determine the root cause of customer complaints.

The results were positive measured in accessibility and retainability, which improved by 11% and 5% during the project. Mobile broadband connectivity complaints fell substantially and Three regained their No. 1 position in independent survey of customer perception in the UK.

There is no doubt that mobile broadband is bringing with it high expectations for a positive experience. To turn this promise into reality, cope with hyper competitive markets, and handle the 50% jump in data growth in countries like India in the first half of 2012 alone, operators around the world need a future-proof and fail-safe approach to providing a superior service experience, generating a better return on investment, taking advantage of the benefits and beauty of mobile broadband, and keeping customers like me happy.

To read more about our new solutions to help operators improve their service operations and end-to-end service lifecycle management, see the latest news about our launch of Service Operations & Management solution and Service Management Capability Center (SMCC) during the #1GBperday$ campaign:

Mobile operators: Are you effectively managing your customers’ service experience? #1GBperday$

Nokia Siemens Networks Service Operations & Management

Join our webinar on Oct 11th, or view it on-demand:
Customer Experience Management: Focus on what matters most