CEM

• Support for benchmarking: A single indicator/index can be
the basis for benchmarking across all the operating
companies in a CSP group, enabling both the parent
company and each operating company to understand the
state of CEM in different countries and local differentiators
that need to be taken into account.
• Customer-driven root cause analysis: The CEI is the
starting point for drilling down into constituent metrics to
discover root causes of poor experience wherever these
occur within the organisation. Customer knowledge can then
be used to prioritise which causes are investigated and
addressed first.
• Proactive improvement: Once root cause(s) are
understood, the CEI can be linked to pre-emptive ways of
avoiding problems in the future: for example, if the index slips
below a certain threshold for a certain customer/customer
segment, it could trigger device management, SON or policy
control systems to remediate a poor user experience
dynamically. The CE indicator can also be used to drive
longer-term business cases for people, process or
technology improvements. One CSP has proved
statistically that making an extraordinary effort to fix a
problem makes minimal difference to an antagonistic
customer's likelihood to churn. It recognises that the best
approach is to identify and stop the fault affecting other
customers or to avoid it in the first place.
Contenders in the single indicator race
There are multiple contenders for the role of a single metric that
summarises customer quality of experience (QoE).
The TMF and a number of BSS/OSS vendors are lining up behind
a Customer Experience Index (CEI – or CEMI according to the
TMF): a single overarching CE score for each customer. This
score is the sum (index) of the CE across all touchpoints and the
customer's outside-in perspective, at any given time. In other
words, the CEI combines the subjective voice of the customer
and objective operational metrics in a highly visual way.
Some CSPs argue that NPS, rather than a constructed CEI, can
act as the ‘single vehicle’ the entire business can rally around.
NPS practitioners are building up an extensive knowledge base of
outside in views that they are making available to their entire
organisation and have gained empirical evidence of NPS's link
with customer churn, revenue generation and/or product and
service uptake.
Other companies are also developing service quality algorithms
based on loss and delay. These are often limited to particular
types of application. They may also be based on multiple average
single-point measures rather than a rigorously composed and
predictable metric. Certain SDN and network operating system
vendors are working on autonomic network resource scheduling
algorithms that aim to remove network contention and the delay it
causes when they establish new virtualised network paths.
CSPs are beginning formally to model application performance
across different network paths so that they can deliver
differentiated application experience to enterprise customers at
different price points. In the hybrid networks that Orange
Business Services (OBS) creates, for example, enterprises can
choose whether applications with different performance
characteristics are delivered over the internet or its private
MPLS/Ethernet network.
All these developments are giving rise to the hope that network
performance management will become a science rather than an
art, using algorithms to predict and control service quality in the
first place – and by proxy, the user experience – rather than
compensating for/fixing user experience failures once they have
occurred.
Which approach will prevail?
Studies have shown that users' experience of the network is by
far the single largest contributor to their perception of a CSP and
their decision to remain loyal to it. CSPs are prioritising network
and service quality improvements within their CEM programmes
because CSPs realise nothing much matters if network quality
isn’t there. A single network QoE index that can drive network
optimisation is highly valuable but many CSPs find it difficult to
create or use because of the siloed nature of their
network/service delivery organisations.
But what of CE factors that a CSP can't control, such as
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