SAN JOSE, Calif. – One challenge facing wireless carriers looking to improve the customer experience is getting a cohesive view of consumer and network behavior across the entire organization. This is becoming an increasing concern as consumers move away from traditionally easy-to-track voice and messaging services and into more complex data interactions.
Speaking during a panel at this week’s TM Forum event in San Jose, Calif., representatives from wireless carriers and software vendors, acknowledged the challenge and said it might be some time before carriers are in the position to take advantage of the intelligence pouring from their networks.
Chris Demange, senior director of core network engineering at Leap Wireless’ Cricket Communications operations, explained that the carrier did have access to a large amount of data coming from consumer usage, but that to this point it mostly used that information to limit data speeds or usage.
“From an engineering perspective, we still look at firm metrics” like blocked calls, dropped calls and data throughput,” explained Demange, who added that he thought that view was beginning to change as carriers begin to look at more theoretical attributes like “net promoter” scores and social media channels to find out how customers feel about their wireless service and attempt to correlate those views into what is actually happening on the network.
“We have discovered from an engineering side that we are fixing engineering problems,” Demange said, adding that the marketing arm was trying to fix these same issues from a social media side.
“It’s important to look across the organization to attempt to detect problems,” Demange explained.
“Once a network issue appears, it’s really too late,” explained Steve Shalita, VP of marketing at NetScout Systems.
Shalita noted that this is an especially important issue for wireless carriers since a customer experiencing a poor session on their phone, including something tied to a downloaded application that has nothing to do with the carrier, will typically blame the carrier for that sub-par experience.
“The customer will always look to blame the name on the phone,” Shalita said.
Eric Carr, VP and GM for mobility at Guavus, echoed that network perception concern, noting that while a “green light” may be showing up on a diagnostic dash board, the end user might not be experiencing a green light level of service. Carr explained that it was important for carriers to look deeper in real time into their networks in order to root out base causes for network issues before they become apparent to the end user.
“The benefit of real-time analytics is that it allows carriers to make real-time changes to their network in order to avoid further problems,” Carr said.
Shalita agreed, noting that many prominent network outages were issues that were present in the network for sometime before finally causing enough damage down stream to be felt by the end user.
“There are pre-issue analytics that are needed to keep the network up and running, and post analytics where you look at the impact of these issues,” Shalita said.
However, while there was general consensus that carriers needed to do more in order to insure a consistent customer experience, those on the panel agreed that operators were not quite ready to turn over that degree of network management to automation.
“There is still a lot of reluctance to allow for automatic managing of network resources because carriers are afraid of just what that automation will do to the network,” Shalita said. “A lot of carriers talk about wanting to do that and can see where SDN can take it, but they not yet comfortable enough to allow automatic changes to the network.”
Carr added that the move to automation could begin for carriers when it comes to managing machine-to-machine services where there is less likely to be a churn-inducing backlash should an automated process result in a less than satisfactory move.
Bored? Why not follow me on Twitter?
