Business customers who usually account for large slices of the ARPU pie are less tolerant of service malfunctions. As carriers depend more and more on their voice and data services to conduct business, they have a unique and mutually beneficial opportunity to prioritize service for enterprises.
By offering guaranteed service-level agreements (SLAs) to business customers, carriers not only ensure that their most active customers are getting flawless service, but also allows them to monitor network performance at a level that ultimately benefits the entire customer base.
Analysis shows that if customers have a single bad experience with a new service, a large percentage of them will never try that service again. OSS providers should, therefore, provide their service provider customers with end-to-end visibility of service quality to ensure that services function correctly for each user on the network.
Leveraging time-saving pre-built service models for key services is crucial. Carriers should also be able to link SLAs to businesses' specific needs, such as third-party content and bandwidth providers.
Mind the details
Network operation managers have to ensure that infrastructure investments are targeted where they will generate the maximum return. This will entail leveraging legacy investment.
They also have to more effectively manage risk exposure during the rollout of new services or technologies, as well as understand network behavior and performance across a wide range of operational conditions.
They should likewise automate manual data collection and error analysis management, simplify and standardize reporting procedures, standardize tools for analyzing network performance across multi-vendor platforms, apply real-time data to identify and resolve problems before they impact services and/or customers, and respond to and manage a network converging on fixed, wireless and IP.
The OSS strategy must be mindful of these issues, and driven by an overall need to drive efficiencies throughout the business.
Strength from the core
Managing service quality for enterprise customers provides not only a great selling strategy, but also a great diagnostic tool. By actively monitoring performance across the entire network, operators can identify and solve potential problems on the network long before it significantly impacts on business and operations.
By identifying and efficiently rectifying the root causes of service-threatening issues, operators enhance the overall health of their infrastructure. Operators can, therefore, attract customers on every level, because they can guarantee the continual and aggressive improvement of quality.
When it comes to SLAs, carriers should give priority to increased enterprise customer growth and retention, evolution toward a more customer-centric organization, establishment of strong end-to-end service quality benchmarks, rapid detection, localization and causal analysis of service-impacting problems, and risk reduction associated with introduction of customer SLAs.
Given the importance of service quality for enterprise customers and the relatively narrow margin for error, operators are in a position to demand SLAs from their OSS providers, just as enterprise customers will demand SLAs of their service provider.
Managing quality of service by customer group or customer segment is critical to driving all aspects of the customer-operator ecosystem. Operators should be able determine who, how, what, when and where a service is used.
They need a solution that provides real-time visibility of service performance against SLAs and other service quality benchmarks. The solution must also equip them with tools to support meaningful, quantifiable and demonstrable customer success.
Prioritizing service resources maximizes customer and business impact. SLAs ensure the proactive identification of customer-impacting problems before those customers contact the operator. They prioritize network operators' efforts to fix issues based on contracted SLA criteria.
Operators should also be able to see a reduction in customer complaints by receiving regular reports by their OSS provider to illustrate the service performance over a given period of time. In turn, this improves customer care, reduces the overall cycle time to resolve problems, and functions as an end-to-end view of new service quality.
Nathan Rae is a channel sales and marketing director at Vallent Corp.