The new concept of Business Quality Management goes far beyond service assurance and enables operators to track the performance of many more of their key business metrics, including field and network operations as well as the performance of their managed services partners, writes Christopher Smith. Co-sponsored feature: Clarity 
                     

                     
Christopher Smith: It is so much cheaper to keep your
customers than attract new ones 
                         
                  
With mature markets saturated, growth opportunities for operators are limited in developed markets while in developing markets, where there is headroom for the industry to grow in terms of new users, competition is intense and ARPU low. Operators therefore are faced with renewed pressure to retain profitable customers, and it is a challenge that must be addressed with a tool set that goes beyond traditional customer relationship management. In particular it requires a far more granular approach that involves taking action based on a user’s or segmented users’ experience and behaviour in near real-time.
That’s critical, says Smith, because operators need the means to differentiate. “When you’ve got more than three operators in any segment there’s hyper-competition which results in a market where operators struggle to profitably sell into and retain customers. Users are happy to churn and often the key differentiation is price. And yet it is so much cheaper to keep existing customers than attract new ones, so managing the customer experience to retain valued customers is a priority.” 
                         


                  
Clarity's build, sell, assure, deliver approach to business quality management
To avoid being left with cutting price as the only means to differentiate, operators need to be able to make decisions about how to handle specific types of service-related issues. That involves providing them with the right data at the right time. “Understanding the customer experience and the quality issues on an individual or customer segmented basis is the foundation that operators need in order to compete in these and other markets,” says Smith. “We’ve developed our Business Quality Management (BQM) system to extract data from across the network and other operator IT systems and expose key performance and quality indicators at a given point in time. It’s about tying the individual customer experience and the individual service level to the network itself and providing the ability to manage that at a customer-segmented level.”
The concept resonates with operators because the functionality is delivered using data from the systems they already have in place. “It doesn’t require wholesale change-out of existing processes and systems,” explains Smith. “We capture existing data and augment it where we need to.”
That attribute has proved appealing to one operator group which is implementing Clarity’s BQM across its business units. “They’ve created service operations centres for each of their units but have a single, group-wide service assurance centre,” he adds. “Their driver is the ability to very quickly launch new services and have a near real time view of how that service performs. By doing this they attract new customers and retain their existing ones. It’s about creating efficiency and agility through proactive BQM.”
“When we presented to them, they were very much of a like mind,” adds Smith. “They were looking for even more fundamental levels of customer experience. For example, they want to know how their name was being mentioned negatively in social media and correlate it back to their business operations. With the right measurements in place you can correlate unhappy customers to tweets and eventually to churn. It’s no longer enough to measure your service quality retrospectively. Operators want to know what the perception of their business is in near real-time. By creating dashboards that quickly show trends in perception, action can be taken before the issue is out of control.”
BQM has the capability to tailor and customise the performance and quality indicators it collects for a specific audience. A customer service professional will require different data to a network engineer, or a manager of a network roll-out project, and BQM is able to extract and correlate the relevant data accordingly. “It requires an exposure layer to be in place on the systems within the operator ecosystem,” explains Smith. “Our own system manages fulfilment and assurance processes for example and exposes those KPIs so we can measure based on that. We’ll also gather statistics from other systems, such as probes and the mediation layer, or the service delivery platform. You don’t need to replace what already exists.”
In addition, the ability BQM gives operators to be proactive is one of its most important attributes “It enables you to retain your high value customers,” says Smith. “For example, if ten emails fail or five Skype sessions are dropped, BQM enables you to identify that has happened, understand why and then do something about it. For the highest value users, you might tie that into a personalised communication, but if many lower value users are suffering from the same experience issues you could address a specific group of users.”
Smith gives the example of a large event such as a music festival where, if the network was congested, a large group of users’ service would be affected. “You could send each user a credit and an apology,” he says. “That’s the kind of proactive capability BQM drives into the market and this is where the BQM layer really comes into play. There are customer experience systems out there and OSS tools out there, along with probes and CRM data. Correlate those and you’ve got the customer context and the network context to allow you to make business decisions.”
The statistics BQM collects from the variety of systems and processes within the business are correlated and presented at many different levels bringing the different statistics needed together to deliver business quality KPIs. “Business quality metrics aren’t just about customer satisfaction, they are about operator efficiency, capacity management and the range of functions that span the whole business,” adds Smith. “Every one of the executive KPIs or KQIs can be traced down through business quality management.”
BQM’s functionality doesn’t stop at service quality management and mitigating customer dissatisfaction in near real-time. It can be applied across the entire operator business to manage internal operations and the performance of outsourced managed services providers.
“We’ve talked about how BQM creates business opportunities from a service quality perspective but it can also be extended into other processes within the operator,” explains Smith. “It can be used to monitor the fulfilment process such as how many times does a customer need to interact with you in relation to a specific product or offering? That’s just as important from a business quality and customer experience perspective.”
Another benefit is in the infrastructure management side of the operator business. BQM can uncover the true customer experience of network capacity issues. “It’s absolutely of interest to know how long it is taking to add capacity to a network,” says Smith. “If it’s taking twice as long as you thought to add capacity to the network, there might be a range of issues causing that delay. It might be regulatory approval causing delay through the process, for example. BQM can identify the root cause and that’s its value proposition. Once the metrics are being obtained across the business, we can see how the business is performing and see where processes or thresholds need to be modified to improve the customer’s experience.”
That functionality is also applicable to operators that have engaged managed services providers to run parts of their operations. “KPIs are the basis of any managed services contract,” adds Smith. “We work with operators that use different managed services providers that have discussions around KPIs for different parts of their operations. I think the managed services trend will drive this forward. Yes, managed services are very much around NOCs at the moment but they are becoming more common place for other core functions such as network roll-out and field services. The root cause analysis of who is to blame when there are issues can be heated and we see BQM as the sort of tool that is becoming a critical part of a managed services providers’ offering to ensure their own SLAs are being met.   GTB
                     
Christopher Smith is chief operating officer of Clarity