Customer experience management gets its own service management layer
Alcatel Lucent has announced that it is making its Motive Customer Experience solution available as a managed service.
To back up the introduction of the managed service the company says it will deploy a patent-pending methodology from Bell Labs that will allow a service provider to monitor the most relevant aspects of the customer experience within the KPIs that make up the managed service's Service Level Agreement.
Modelling a service provider's business priorities will provide a more customised managed service solution, according to Alcatel-Lucent, by feeding that data into SLAs that reflect the actual business performance of an operator. Alcatel Lucent said that this removes the "guesswork: currently involved in measuring customer satisfaction with service levels: instead of measuring all the network performance criteria under the sun, it wants to hone in on what matters most to subscribers.
Jack Zatz, Managed Services Portfolio Director at Alcatel Lucent, said that the new methodology is a core part of the managed service offering, as it enables Al-Lu to narrow down the KQIs that go to make up the SLAs that assure the managed service agreement.
"When you negotiate SLAs you can get into dozens or hundreds of KQIs. Carriers will have the goals of reducing churn and increasing ARPU so need to hone on those things that help measure that: information from devices, network and applications and things like the regulatory environment, competitive pressures, usage studies, research results etc. All this is made to fit in with what that customer wants."
Zatz provided the example of an operator looking to provide data services at $20 per month and another who is looking for very high ARPU from upgraded services.
"Both want to provide high quality services, and pride themselves on their service quality, but their priorities of how they measure that will be quite different. This methodology makes those distinguishing characteristics to determine a particular business objective."
Alcatel Lucent sees itself as providing a middle service management layer between the network management layer where the monitoring, fault resolution and maintenance occurs, and the top layer of the call centre and business management.
"That middle service management layer has never been quite so extensively delivered," Zatz said.