Peter Mottishaw Jessica Figueras
Telecom operators must have visibility of the operation and execution of services in
this new environment. They must establish processes to track the customer’s experience
of the service, including the ordering process and the [execution] of the service.

this hard data, but only if they are deployed in- aged independently, so there is a challenge in
telligently. Are they asking the right questions? integrating the OSS/BSS systems to provide
Is enough data being gathered to provide a de- adequate management for new converged ser-
cent overview of the situation? How is the data vices. Service providers must be able to include
to be interpreted? third-party networks and services as part of a
Vendors have an opportunity to plug the gap converged service.
by providing more guidance as to what the data With complex services the biggest challenge is
means, in business terms. to get accurate real-time measurements on ser-
Mottishaw: IVR systems and Web portals pro- vice quality. These are required for a meaningful
vide statistics on customer behavior, but these SLA and to predict the quality of experience for
are sometimes hard to interpret and do not pro- the end-customer.
vide sufficient granularity. With a detailed view Figueras: Typical service provider blind spots
of individual customer behavior, it is possible to tend to arise because systems support for com-
interpret the true customer experience. munication between separate business domains
Our view is that as self-care Web portals and is poor. Data does not flow between domains,
IVR systems improve and customers adapt to and perhaps most importantly, processes are
them, detailed granular measurements of indi- not designed to work across domains. With IT
vidual customer behavior will provide the best systems playing an increasingly important role
measure of customer experience. in the telecom network, mainstream IT perfor-
mance monitoring becomes more important.
Q:W Performance should be monitored at many
_mhat challenges do operators face when
onitoring multiple services to ensure a good levels, in order to get the big picture–not
customer experience and to verify SLAs? just at network element level, but also at
Mottishaw: Historically, the separate net- the transaction level. Ideally, operators will
works and service platforms have been man- _{continued on next page >}