Analyst Insight: What are Customers Really Experiencing?

increasingly look to real-time tools in order servers, such as J2EE or .NET, in the telecom
to respond immediately to issues rather than service layer and the introduction of converged
having to clear them up later, once the damage services have made order management and the
to their reputation has already been done. overall service fulfillment process more com-
plex. In order to activate the service correctly,
Q:I the fulfillment process must touch multiple net-
_ps it reasonable to say that many service
roviders use their customer base as a quality- work elements, application servers and poten-
assurance team? tially partners. This puts a much greater empha-
Figueras: Yes, these days you often hear the sis on processes and tools to monitor and track
complaint that customers have become unpaid transactions within the fulfillment process.
beta testers. This issue is not isolated to fulfillment. Most
Is there any way to quantify the impact? Yes, OSS, BSS and SDP deployments are facing the
it is possible, by using technology that can help requirement to interface to a greater diversity of
you to correlate network performance issues application servers, network infrastructure and
with actual customer outcomes, such as an partners. They also typically include J2EE as a
incorrectly billed item or a failure to deliver the key platform. Telecom operators must have
service. This is challenging because it requires visibility of the operation and execution of
quite strong alignment between the network services in this new environment. They must
and care/marketing teams. Such collaborative establish processes to track the customer’s
practices are not typically the service provider’s experience of the service, including the or-
strongest suit. Nevertheless, the idea is being dering process and the [execution] of the
promoted by a variety of vendors, such as CA service. This means having common tools that
Wily, who want to help service providers to provide end-to-end, real-time visibility of indi-
create a mapping between abstract technical vidual transactions across the network and the
events and a real-life business event. IT infrastructure. Suppliers such as CA, with its
Mottishaw: With Internet services, beta Introscope and Customer Experience Manager
release testing has proved effective, but with [products], address these requirements.
telecom services, customers have expectations Telecom operators need to recognize this as
of quality and reliability and are paying for the a strategic issue and develop a common ap-
service. proach applicable to OSS, BSS and SDP deploy-
There are a number of examples of major ser- ments. In the case of order management, this
vice deployments that have failed or struggled approach will enable the operator to quickly
because of lack of visibility on quality of service. respond to issues that impact the customer
WAP services failed to take off when first re- experience, such as long provisioning times,
leased because of quality issues. More recently, failures in the ordering process or violation of
mobile push-to-talk services that use VoIP partner SLAs.
technology have struggled because of quality- Figueras: It is possible, if there is strong inte-
of-service issues and lack of visibility of GPRS gration at a process level between all the differ-
performance. ent applications involved, plus all the necessary
fall-back mechanisms. Truly automated end-to-
Q:I end processes are what every service provider
_pf there’s no human intermediary involved at any
oint of that fully-automated process, how can is aspiring to and some have achieved. BT, for
operators ensure that all orders go through and that example, has succeeded in automating much of
none fall out at some stage? its order-to-fulfillment chain. A number of ven-

Mottishaw: The introduction of IT application dors provide technologies that can help. g