CEM

e difficult to sustain this model and resolve issues in
a timely manner.
In most cases, there may be multiple touch points
involved in resolving a customer’s issue as it escalates
through the CSP in a series of steps, detailed below:
Step 1 - When the call is placed or made by the
customer, the first responder is usually someone from
customer care who has little or no technical
knowledge. This person is normally restricted to
traditional CRM solutions and customer billing
information.
Step 2 usually involves the customer care operator
passing the issue to technical support. This
department usually has access to some form of
service performance tool or application, but, again,
has limited technical knowledge and so is often
unable to quantify, never mind resolve, any issue.
As a result, a given issue may well involve Step 3,
where technical support engages the customer again
in order to better understand the nature of the issue.
Even then, it is highly likely that technical support will
have to then pass a large number of calls and issues
to network operations and engineering for
investigation and resolution, which is Step 4.
Accelerate problem resolution
Deploying an effective and intuitive customer experience
solution in a customer service environment allows
technical support or non-expert staff to troubleshoot
basic customer-affecting problems, enabling them to
resolve a higher percentage of customer issues and
deliver better overall service from the customer
perspective. This also results in an overall reduction in
issue mean time to repair (MTTR), an objective of
nearly all service providers as it reduces not only the
operational expense involved in resolving customer
affecting problems (Step 3), but also minimises
potential revenue losses as part of a service outage.
Furthermore, fewer issues or troubletickets are passed
to network operations and engineering (Step 4),
freeing up resources for complex issues such as
improving network reliability and service quality.
The Empirix Customer Experience solution is
IN ASSOCIATION WITH TELARIX
designed for use by a CSP’s technical support staff. It
accommodates evolving service provider
environments and consists of a scalable platform
based on the Empirix System Architecture. The
solution supports fast retrieval of individual or
customer group information, including analysis of
related service experience. Support staff access
customer information – including the device type
being used as well as actual service experiences at a
related location or locations – by entering basic
customer details such as a phone number or by
selecting a specific customer group. This information
is displayed and summarised in a non- technical
format, enabling analysis by technical support staff
with no knowledge of how each service itself works,
never mind the underlying network technology.
Service experience is determined by specific key
performance indicators (KPIs) derived directly through
each customer’s interaction with both the network and
related services they access or use. The KPIs
available within the solution target:
• Service Access – Can the customer actually
access the network and the required service?
• Service Performance – Once the customer has
accessed the network – or, in the case of mobile,
physically attached – and is using the service
requested, what is their service experience for
voice, SMS, MMS, and data?
• Service Handovers – In the case of mobile, can
the customer move around the network without
service interruption or performance issues?
By arranging the information in such a format,
technical support staff can rapidly identify and
diagnose customer-affecting problems. More
significantly, they are able to determine if the problem
is unique to the individual customer raising the issue
or related to an issue impacting other customers who
are in the same location or using the same service.
The solution also enables the same customer issues
to be further analysed by more technical/expert staff
by providing in-context drilldown into dedicated
troubleshooting tools. As a result, CSPs not only have
a more detailed insight into the customer experience,
but they also gain accelerated problem resolution.
Deploying an effective
and intuitive customer
care solution in a
customer service
environment allows
technical support or nonexpert
staff to
troubleshoot basic
customer-affecting
problems, enabling them
to resolve a higher
percentage of customer
issues and deliver better
overall service from the
customer perspective
www.empirix.com
VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2015
39