June 2010
With the rise of smart phones, networked devices and almost ubiquitous wireless broadband connectivity, it’s definitely a mobile world now. That’s a great thing for consumers as well as communications providers looking to grow revenue. But what does this level of mobile usage mean for the quality of service we experience?
Mobile data traffic has grown 280 percent annually over the past two years and is expected to double each year between now and 2015. Exploding demand for mobile services threatens to cause network congestion and diminished service quality. That, in turn, increases the chances that customers might defect to competitors, since a disappointing user experience is a leading cause of churn.
Mobile bandwidth has become a precious commodity. To effectively monetize that bandwidth, providers need to be able to measure, monitor and manage network service quality to protect their customer base. A delicate balancing act is required: managing network expenditures to keep costs as low as possible, while also delivering the customer experiences and service innovations necessary to increase market share.
Accenture recommends a comprehensive, four-part method to delivering high-quality service while holding costs down:
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A quality operations center—that is, a centralized approach to quality management—helps monitor and control overall service quality.
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Enhanced policy management can dynamically adapt network resources according to demand to relieve network congestion.
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Innovative mobile device management capabilities can help companies understand the service quality that customers are experiencing on their devices.
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Network and application probes can proactively discover the source of service issues.
Together, these four levers of service quality management can advance service providers toward high performance by helping them reduce costs, increase network efficiency and improve customer satisfaction and retention. |
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1. Improving customer satisfaction: The quality operations center
At the highest level, monitoring the service experience of customers requires a capability Accenture calls a quality operations center. This center is an integrated platform that centralizes the information needed to measure, evaluate and improve the overall quality of a carrier’s delivered services.
By rapidly identifying causes of poor quality as perceived by the customer, the operations center helps carriers take corrective action only where it is needed to improve the quality of experience. This increases the speed of problem resolution and cuts costs that are incurred when carriers take corrective actions that are not actually related to the relevant service issues.
The center also enables important capabilities that improve operations and efficient project development. The quality operations center platform facilitates the flow of information among a company’s marketing, customer care and network operations functions. This can improve the management of service creation programs, keeping costs low, quality high and projects on time.
2. Prioritizing network traffic to increase profitability: Policy management
Increasing revenues in the era of mobile data services depends on the ability to manage network traffic at a more detailed level. This capability requires advanced solutions in policy management, enabling greater control over service quality by dynamically adapting network resources to a user’s status and real-time usage. An effective policy management infrastructure controls and dynamically adapts network resources based on application and network triggers.
Robust policy management capabilities will prove to be even more important as regulations in different parts of the world necessitate better real-time access by carriers to subscriber usage data. For example, European regulation (the so-called “Bill Shock Prevention” policy) now requires that subscribers who are using roaming capabilities be informed immediately when their data roaming bill has reached a certain level. Innovative policy management functionality helps carriers more easily comply with such regulations.
Such innovations in policy management can also enable companies to more effectively control and shape network traffic. If congestion occurs on the network, companies can reduce bandwidth for certain kinds of traffic, giving priority to more profitable services.
The benefits of improved policy management can be substantial. Accenture helped one provider implement new policy management capabilities to reduce network congestion. As a result, the company achieved a 50 percent reduction in less profitable peer-to-peer traffic (for example, data transfers between users). More profitable downstream traffic (such as Internet downloads) grew by 45 percent while customer satisfaction improved, demonstrated by a reduction in trouble tickets generated from customer service centers.
3. Improving service quality: Mobile device management
Delivering consistently high mobile service quality depends on the ability to determine what customers are experiencing on their devices in real time. With an ever-increasing number of devices on the market, and with an ever-expanding suite of functions, consumers are frequently bewildered by the complexity of devices—a situation that has the potential to decrease usage and, therefore, average revenue per user.
Carriers can deliver advanced user-centric functionality and support with the aid of a mobile device management capability. This suite of technologies and tools gives customer service representatives a more complete view of the user’s experience, enabling rapid diagnosis and troubleshooting of device-related problems, and therefore faster resolution. Tailored support can be provided where it often matters most—right at the device, where customers form their most enduring impressions of a company’s brand and service.
An especially innovative aspect of advanced service monitoring capabilities is a mobile device quality agent. Imagine software, installed on customers’ mobile phones, that effectively turns thousands of mobile devices into stations capable of monitoring service performance cost-effectively. The software on customers’ mobile phones can monitor service performance and quality, raise alarms if service quality falls below a pre-set threshold and also collect data that can be analyzed to uncover root-cause problems.
This approach addresses one of the biggest challenges mobile carriers face in delivering agreed-to service levels to customers: the fact that carriers can monitor current network conditions on their end but find it hard to pinpoint problems that may be degrading the experience actually produced by the user’s device. With device-based insight into service quality, companies can understand what’s happening and take action.
4. Taking correction action: Real-time network and application probing
Providers cannot wait for problems to develop in their networks that cause outages or serious service degradation. They need to be proactive in identifying potential problems. This is accomplished through network and application probes that help carriers assess quality through the entire service delivery chain and throughout the distributed network systems.
Probes can be enabled across all network and application domains, including radio access, backhaul, transport, core network and value-added services. This capability includes network diagnostics which then interface directly with the operations support system to provide information about performance, quality and any apparent faults.
Managing the journey to advanced mobile broadband services
Discussions of the new era of mobile high-speed broadband are usually focused on new network technologies, innovative services and an ever-expanding array of devices. But seeing through the eyes of the customer is equally important. Monitoring individual usage and tailoring the right experience to the right need will be critical to success, along with the ability to probe the network and mobile applications to discover the source of service issues.
Competitive advantage in the high-speed mobile broadband era depends on customer-centricity. Across deployment strategies, network planning, service and support, communications companies that successfully drive profitable growth and high performance will do so by keeping the customer experience at the forefront
About the authors
Paolo Sidoti is the Europe and Latin America lead for the Accenture Network service line.
Florian Michel-Gabriel is Accenture’s Europe and Latin America lead for Wireless Broadband Deployment.
Marco D’Aleo is Accenture’s Europe and Latin America lead for Wireline Broadband Deployment.
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