CSPs and the CEM Conundrum: How End-to-End Service Experience Is a Game Changer
With competition between communications service providers (CSPs) increasing more than ever before, so has the importance of customer experience management (CEM)—and its impact on SLAs, customer retention and the bottom line.
CSPs are indeed facing an unprecedentedly difficult juggling act: deploying new network technologies, provisioning new services and ensuring stellar subscriber experience along the way. Naturally, CSPs are making greater efforts on their CEM strategies to understand how individual subscribers are using their services, what is negatively impacting their overall quality of service, and what can be done to improve the user experience from a variety of fronts. But from a network perspective, how can all this be effectively achieved?
Essentially, CSPs must monitor, glean data and collate information from all aspects of service delivery in order to proactively identify issues so that they can be quickly remediated. Unfortunately, many CSPs still lack the capabilities and right solutions to harvest this deep insight into network performance.
Luckily, the landscape is changing.
Real-time, cloud-based and open solutions, such as EXFO Xtract, are paving the way for CSPs to have comprehensive, end-to-end views of their subscribers’ service experience. These platforms get input from the whole service chain—from customers’ devices to the service, network and data centers—and, thanks to powerful analytics capabilities, provide highly precise, accurate and actionable network intelligence into the service experience across all CSP teams.
CSPs are finding that such rich service assurance analytics are paramount in keeping their businesses in the game.
EXFO’s Chief Technology Officer, Vikas Arora, recently provided a compelling perspective on CSPs increased use of CEM at the network level. It’s a great read in Pipeline magazine on how providers are turning network data into (almost) customer gold.
