When network management meets customer experience management

At the CommunicAsia show in Singapore in June I caught up with Mike Ropicky vice president Asia Pacific for Tektronix Communications. The company has an interesting approach to customer experience management that is underpinned by its network monitoring and service assurance technologies.

This might seem an odd field for a company most often associated with oscilloscopes and test gear, but while Tektronix and Tektronix Communications (TC) have a common name and common ownership they are in fact two largely separate entities.

The origins of TC go back 10 years to when Tektronix acquired Inet Technologies, a company that had developed service assurance technologies that enable the identification of specific customers or subscriber groups impacted by network or service issues.

Tektronix was acquired by Danaher Corporation in 2007 and Ropicky said the new owner decided that the test equipment business and the network management and monitoring arm did not sit well together, so created Tektronix Communications.

He explained TC’s journey to the present day: “We owned a bunch of troubleshooting and diagnostic applications which helped operators see what was right and what was wrong with the network and those probes were collecting a lot of relevant information that was useful not just for troubleshooting and diagnostics but that could be used for customer experience management.

“So we bought a Dublin-based company in 2009 called Arantech, because we recognised that we had to have the customer’s view. Their product is called Touchpoint, and they were one of the first companies to do customer experience management. So now we have our probes at the core of the network feeding information into the Touchpoint application to give the specific customer view.”

He summed up how TC’s technology can be used to identify and resolve specific customer issues. “When customers are having problems they call the contact centre but their calls fall on deaf ears. The people in the call centre cannot see the problem so they go to the engineers, and the engineers cannot see the problem, but since our probes can see into and through all vendors’ networks we can start to link up the call trace and we can link the customer experience to where the network is breaking and send the trouble ticket to the right people who can use the same data to see and correct the problem.”

To extend this capability into the radio access portion of mobile networks - where 70 percent of the problems occur according to Ropicky - TC recently acquired Newfield Wireless, a company that, he says “has the capability to understand what was going on in the radio access network.”

And better still than simply being able to identify the root cause of a customer’s problem when they call in is being able to forestall that call, saving the operator the cost of responding to customer queries.

But this, according to Ropicky, is just the beginning: being able to combine vast amounts of data about the performance of the network and linking that to information about a specific customer’s experience of that network opens up a huge range of possibilities.

“We can combine information from the core of the network and combine that with information from the billing systems and the CRM systems and from the radio access network and when you start pulling these levers you find ways to do things you never thought of.”

He talked of “filling a data lake” with all kinds of meaningful information that could be correlated. One example he gave was that the technology could enable an operator to prioritise areas for network upgrades from 3G to 4G. “You could look at what the 3G users were doing, what apps they were using and how much they were spending.”

CONCLUSION

Delivering an optimum customer experience, and using net promoter scores to measure progress towards that goal has now become almost an obsession for telcos. So too has the notion of serving each customer individually.

Back in 1997 Frank Blount, the high level US telco executive brought in to steer Telstra into the era of untrammelled competition, gave a speech to a conference in Sydney entitled "The Segment of One", the one in this case being the customer.

He unveiled a new mantra for Telstra’s marketing, "customer intimacy", telling the conference: "The determining convergence in our industry will be the convergence between customer demands or desires and the service offerings of companies who cross any necessary boundary or tradition in order to wrap around those demands and therefore establish crucial advantage."

Over several years Blount's successors re-iterated his theme, with variations, but there was one major obstacle to Telstra realising that vision: determining the demands and desires of that "segment of one". Telstra went to great lengths to come as close as possible to doing so. In 2006 the then CEO, Sol Trujillo, announced that Telstra had surveyed 22,000 residential and SME customers. "We have identified seven needs-based segments, 18 product segments and 126 microsegments. No segmentation work like this has ever been done in the industry," he said. "It’s going to enable us to be very, very targeted in terms of how we interact with our customers, how we sell to our customers, how we define a customer experience and then ultimately how we operate our business.”

Today it looks like the synergy between network management and monitoring, customer experience management and data analytics might be making the achievement of a customer segment of one a reality.