[Yankee Group]: Customer Experience - Hot Issue for MWC 2012

Declan Lonergan (pictured), VP, Yankee Group says in his MWC preview that "Customer experience will be front and center. Operators will present various strategies for improving customer experience, but a variety of operational, analytical and process-oriented solutions will come to the fore from companies such as Amdocs, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei, as well as a slew of startups".


See "2012 MWC Preview: What's Hot and What's Not" - here. Related post - "[Infonetics]: CEM - a Vendor's Buzzword?" - here.

EFLAG's Network Intelligence Solution for MNOs

 
I am not sure if this is a new product or not, but I've just noticed NetVision, a DPI based Network Intelligence product from EFLAG, a Chinese "global provider of engineering services and innovative solutions for mobile network planning, optimization, and more .. The company is providing consultancy and managed services to Tier 1 equipment vendors, such as, Nokia Siemens Networks, Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, and Alcatel-Lucent".

EFLAG classifies NetVision as a "subscriber & service centric turnkey solution for Customer Experience Management based on the Deep Packet Inspection technology".

"NetVision helps mobile operators to unveil the information buried into their subscriber data in order to generate more revenue, reduce costs and increase overall customer satisfaction through a unique approach to Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring. Based on a massive statistical data analysis, subscriber information is extracted at core network interfaces and specifically target 2G/3G/4G mobile data applications (HTTP, DNS, MMS, WAP, FTP, Streaming, email, IM, etc...)"

"Through Deep Packet Inspection technology (DPI), NetVision reassembles every subscriber application session at OSI layer 7 and evaluates the performance perceived by each subscriber .. can be deployed on both portable hardware for short-term network monitoring, optimization and troubleshooting projects, or as a complete OSS platform for long-term E2E monitoring, subscriber management and Service Level Assurance (SLA) ..NetVision is performing deep traffic analysis through massive data captures at IP-based core network interfaces (Iu-PS, Gb, Gn, Gi, Gw, MMx "

[Infonetics]: CEM - a Vendor's Buzzword?

 

In a post to Tekelec's Blog, Shira Levine (pictured), Directing Analyst, Next Gen OSS and Policy, at Infonetics Research, writes about top trend she saw in 2011 -  customer experience management (CEM). 

Shira defines CEM as "is all about understanding how the subscriber wants to interact with his/her CSP and acting accordingly .. And though CEM does indeed have a lot to do with customer care, billing, and service assurance, policy management plays a huge and often underappreciated role".

Then the post post mentions some tiered services ideas - we usually find those in DPI and Policy Management vendors' presentations - such as "sell a movie package that includes four HD movies each month with guaranteed quality of service" or "exempts traffic from social networking sites from monthly quotas".

Great ideas, but as the post acknowledges, this is still a vendor pitch - "Why, then, aren’t more operators deploying these new service plans?".

According to a recent MNO survey by Connected Business Research (also posted today - here) "When it comes to changing billing plans, technology readiness/cost and regulatory considerations are much less important than market perception and competitive considerations" (here). Ms. Levine seems to agree - "the service is no longer about what the network can support, but about what the customer wants".

My bottom line - MNOs will buy the technology and implement new service plans if they can see a clear business case (ROI) for generating more revenues. It seems that they haven’t been convinced yet, beyond the simple models of Usage based Billing that are there also to control Opex.

More here - "Bringing Customer Experience Management From Slideware to Reality" - here.