CEM Market Update by The Mobile Network

A TMN PUBLICATION IN ASSOCIATION WITH SPATIALBUZZ

The Mobile Network // www.the-mobile-network.com

Making sense of the world’s mobile networks

////////// CEM MARCH 2015

t e k r a M M CE e t a d Up r data e m o t s rator u e c p d o n e a twork ough th e r n h t w y o e H n its jour s e k a m

THE MOBILE NETWORK // INFOGRAPHIC: MAPPING THE CEM DATA JOURNEY /////////////////////////////////////

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT // MARKET UPDATE

Hi!

SPATIALBUZZ 03 Andrew Blake

FEATURES 04 CEM, What does it mean? 07 Building a CEM presence

on DEVICE

INFOGRAPHIC 10 Mapping the CEM data journey

About three to four years ago CEM was the hottest telco buzzword around. Then along came Het Nets, NFV, SDN and 5G, and CEM went from front and centre of the booths of the main vendors to a side alley. That is exactly why it is an excellent time to revisit the topic, because CEM hasn’t gone away in the mean time. Far from it, in fact. The processes that enable CEM are core to establishing operators’ continuing relevance and grabbing the opportunities that are enabled by the agile networks built upon Het Net, NFV-SDN and even 5G technologies. So this CEM market update looks at the journey of network data into operators’ CEM strategies. How do you get to the data. What data do you need to get hold of? What do you do with it when you have it? How long does that take? Who do you share the data with, and how do you share that data? The good news is that if you answer these questions, you go a long way to thinking about your own relevance and future as a mobile network operator. That’s because you can turn this series of investments into something that offers you insight not just into your customer experience, but your own business, and the untapped opportunities that lie before you. As you build the flexible, agile network of your dreams, CEM becomes the key to unlock top line growth.

Editorial Director: Keith Dyer Email: keith@the-mobile-network.com Commercial Director: Shahid Ramzan Email: shahid@the-mobile-network.com

LISTINGS 12 Companies under the CEM umbrella

SPONSOR’S FOREWORD: SPATIALBUZZ

INVOLVING THE CUSTOMER IN THE CEM ECOSYSTEM Andrew Blake, CTO, SpatialBuzz, says operators can build upon the CEM ecosystem to develop a renewed focus on customer engagement. The over-arching goal of CEM as a discipline is to give operators a means to enhance customer loyalty, reduce customer care costs and ultimately to increase revenues. Until now, there has been a lot of focus on technical measurement and analysis but a crucial voice has often been lacking - that of the customer. Although many solutions and platforms claim to enable CEM very often they are not about interacting with the customer. Nor do they listen to the actual voice of the customer - preferring instead to work via a mediated version of the customer experience, as provided by probes, network management systems and the like. Naturally, a CEM strategy must be built upon strong foundations - in this case a clear technical understanding of network behaviour. But the danger is that CEM begins and ends with this analysis, meaning an operator holds its technical information at arm’s length from the customer, remaining distant. At SpatialBuzz we believe that a more transparent approach to network data will result in benefits for both customers

and operators. A critical element of that is to establish real-time, two-way customer engagement that includes the customer in a conversation about the network and the actual, lived customer experience. However, we are aware that CEM doesn’t begin and end with any one process or platform. A truly engaged operator will build a CEM strategy upon multiple available data sources, upon intelligent data analysis, and upon structured outputs of that data. That means building a CEM ecosystem that embraces network, customer and subscriber data. Crucially, however, operators must build on that ecosystem to establish channels to open up the network in a transparent manner, sharing data between customer care and marketing teams, executive management, network and service operations and, most importantly, the customer. Do this, and the end-result will be a crowd-shaped network that truly meets customers’ needs and helps operators move their CEM programmes to the next generation.

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CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

What does it mean? CEM - Customer Experience Management has become such a catch-all term that it is in danger of losing its meaning.

What does it mean? CEM - Customer Experience Management - has become such a catch-all term that it is in danger of losing its meaning. One industry executive I spoke to on background as part of my research for this article told me that even though his company markets itself as a leader in CEM, he doesn’t really even like the term very much, nor does he think it really describes what his company does. The problem is the company in question just can’t think of a new term that has currency in the industry that it can hitch its wagon to. You see this sort of thinking reflected by others who use the CEM term with a slightly weary raise of the eyebrows and an inflection that says, “Yes I know CEM is an over-used term but it’s the best we’ve got for now”. The problem is that CEM as a term is both sufficiently vague as to be easily understood in general terms, and

sufficiently vague as to be adopted by companies who do radically different things within the operator business. So what should we understand by the term Customer Experience Management? Broken down, you would say that CEM refers to the management of any process within the operator business that impacts on the way the customer interacts with the operator. Under that definition, simply having a “good” network comes under the CEM banner, because it’s a pretty poor experience if a customer cannot get on the network to make a call, browse the web or watch a video. Having a well-ordered website, or helpful customer agents in the call centre, is also “CEM”, because you are making the experience of interacting with you easier for your customer.

MARKET UPDATE: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

This, then, is the great dream. Create a breathing data engine that, as it inhales, can: • understand who and where customers are (subscriber data) So really, it’s not ridiculous to think that just about everything an operator does is related to CEM in some way or another and then how is CEM in anyway a relevant or meaningful term? One way round this is to perhaps focus on the often overlooked part of the CEM trifecta - the Management. The industry tends to focus on the customers, and the experience those customers are having, but CEM, if it is anything, is about the Management of that relation between customer and experience. In other words, “doing CEM” is about having an actual strategy to understand what it is your business looks like from the point of view of your customers. Management in this sense is about understanding, evaluating and if necessary taking action to improve, how your touchpoints with the customer are actually experienced by those customers. So it’s not just about having a good network, it’s about managing how services are delivered across the network so that you are doing the best, most relevant, job you could be doing for your customers. It’s not just about having a call centre, it’s

about the call centre having access to the relevant network and subscriber data so they can understand the customer experience and communicate something of worth to that angry customer. It’s not just having a customer care app, or web page, or social media presence, but doing something with it that actually enhances your customers’ interaction. This journey - the understanding of the network performance, what services customers are accessing and if they are being delivered appropriately, what you can do either to improve that service delivery or to improve your customer communications - that is a process that will result in you actually managing the customer experience. Viewed this way round, with the focus on what you are doing to tie the network to the customer, and the customer to your channels of outreach, CEM makes sense. It makes even more sense if the customer, the network (for which read network and service operations teams) and your customer-facing channels all have mediated access to the same data.

• what they are trying to do, and if things are working well (application and performance data) • understand relevant network conditions (network data) and then once the data engine has breathed in all that data, it exhales relevant data that can be used to • take action in the network (network operations, service operations) • give call centre staff full information • tell a customer automatically what’s going on (social media channels, apps, chat etc) This, then, creates a view of CEM that still encompasses a wide range of functions but with a clear goal of building multiple paths of action. That actually makes sense of CEM the catch-all umbrella term, the ridiculously wide net cast over most of an operator’s business. It views those processes through the prism of the end customer, but in a meaningful, dare one say actionable, way rather than as a vague gesture to doing something about customer experience.

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BUILDING A CEM PRESENCE

BUILDING A CEM PRESENCE GETTING TO THE DATA - BUILDING CONTEXTUAL NETWORK VISIBILITY There are various ways of getting out into the network to understand what is occurring. You need to know who the customer is, which means a link to subscriber data centres so you know if you are dealing with a high value customer, a corporate contract, someone who is out of data bundle etc. You need to know where they are, which brings in a geo-location or spatial element - this can be accessed by cell-iD and other in-network location signifiers. What they are trying to do. This requires application-level awareness, so you can see what video, app, game, voice app etc a customer is trying to use. When it comes to the network, you need to know how the network is performing in the context of all the above. Is there sufficient bandwidth to keep the high value consumer of an app happy? Do I know why enterprise users in a certain location are seeing high dropped call rates? This landscape of discovery has meant the following locations have appeared for building contextual network visibility.

GETTING TO THE DATA ANALYSING IT (WHERE, HOW, WHEN?) DOING SOMETHING WITH IT (WHO, HOW, HOW OFTEN)

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

IN THE NETWORK

DPI FOR APP RECOGNITION AND CLASSIFICATION DPI machines can sit in core elements providing protocol, application-iD and metadata classification and extraction within elements such as the GGSN and SGSN, in gateway elements and in standalone functions along the network path. Their role is to give visibility into the “what” of the traffic. They work by having a library of protocols and application “signatures” that they match to live traffic. They are required to be a non-blocking element in the network, and scaleable to peak flows. 7 TMN MARKET UPDATE

BUILDING A CEM PRESENCE

PROBES AND ANALYSERS - ASSURANCE Network probes and traffic, session and protocol analysers sit on key interfaces (eg A, Gb, Gi, Gn, Iub, Iur, Iu, S1 S8), “tapping” network data to provide signaling and user-plane analysis. These have been, and still are, used as the bedrock of network test, monitoring and performance assurance systems. Probes enable operators to get access to a whole set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to identify and troubleshoot any problem affecting customer experience.

THE DRIVE FOR REAL-TIME DATA HAS SEVERAL CAUSES:

EMS COUNTERS The internal data from the network elements themselves. This sort of measurement is usually specific to the telecoms equipment manufacturers themselves. Over the years there have been various attempts to create open EMS (Element Management System) initiatives between the main vendors. Always seem to fizzle out.

DRIVE AND WALK TEST Sending vehicles and people out with a bank of test devices and recording metrics such as signal strength, throughput etc in a range of specified locations. The methodology can build up a more “on the ground” picture of a network but is inevitably limited in terms of its time scale (one snapshot of each location).

FROM THE USERS Therefore there has been an effort to gain a more continuous view of network performance, by installing agents on the device, or giving users the ability to self-report issues, or share results of speed tests etc. The incentive to do this is usually that the user will receive information back in return, in the form of coverage maps or interaction from the operator on service performance.

PROBES ENABLE OPERATORS TO GET ACCESS TO A WHOLE SET OF KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIS) TO IDENTIFY AND TROUBLESHOOT ANY PROBLEM AFFECTING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. 8 TMN MARKET UPDATE

BUILDING A CEM PRESENCE

WEB CHAT / FORUMS / MONITOR SOCIAL MEDIA: By monitoring activity on forums, in customer chat sessions and on social media, analytics tools can build up a picture of where problems are building up. Increasingly companies have developed multi-channel tools to enable the analysis of customer sentiment across different properties, and to engage to resolve issues and influence perception.

ANALYSING THE DATA The analysis of the data above depends on the output required (see following section). The increasing requirement for a real time or near real time view of the operating environment - driven by requirements around CEM and monetisation - has lead to new approaches to analysing the acquired data. This ranges from companies offering new Big Data engines to the deployment of cloud-based, elastic infrastructure, where the data analysis load is balanced across available resources. The drive for real-time (or near to it) has several causes: the requirement to be ahead of customers issues, to run active policy enforcement and traffic control measures, to thinking about monetisation - leveraging these platforms to be able to offer customers and partners more personalised offers, often on the fly.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE DATA The third leg of the journey takes data and presents it to user groups in a way that makes sense to that group. So that could be sharing a customer input (complaint online) with the technical team, or it could be the technical team sharing open data with the CRM systems, or it could even be in the form of an interaction back to the customer. There is also a time-dependent element here - the time to action. Previously data held by the network team (say the source and probe data) would not have made its way in any meaningful sense to the customer-facing teams. Likewise feeds and information coming into the customer-facing units would not have been available to networks and service operations teams. It is the Customer Experience Management vision that brings all this together.

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MARKET UPDATE INFOGRAPHIC: CEM VISUALISATION

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COMPANIES UNDER

THE CEM UMBRELLA

DPI FOR CLASSIFICATION

PROBES - SERVICE ASSURANCE

Companies in this sector often provide embedded intelligence in the network and are therefore “under the hood” in other companies’ core network, Policy and Gateway solutions. The same is true for performance assurance and CEM use cases. Qosmos, for example supplies to CEM4Mobile, Commprove, Polystar and Empirix. Enabling virtualisation of the function will become (and is already) a key capability for companies in this area. Virtualised network functions will still required embedded DPI, so who is NFV-ready and understands the requirements?

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Polystar’s OSIX probe-base system captures all signalling and user data events and feeds this data into the Jupiter application suite. Astellia’s assurance solutions are built on the Neptune and Ocean passive probes. Tektronix Communications (GeoProbe), Exfo (Powerhawk) and CommProve (with Netledge) are other examples of companies that bring together probe data acquisition with counters and OAM data. Competition and differentiation tends to focus around capacities, speed and scale of network monitoring, as well as protocol support and analysis capabilities.

FEATURE: COMPANIES UNDER THE CEM UMBRELLA

SON - GEO-ANALYTICS AMDOCS | JDSU | TEOCO | CELLWIZE | CISCO Over the past two years there has been a bunch of deals as either network equipment vendors (eg. Ericsson, Cisco) or CEM and assurance companies, (eg Infovista, TEOCO, Amdocs) have bought companies that have developed SON algorithms to designed to automate the planning and optimisation of mobile networks. While SON has tended to act as a separate discipline, these deals are evidence of a direction of travel towards a more integrated approach to customer and geo analytics, and network optimisation. One to keep an eye on.

ELEMENTS: CALL TRACES, STATS COUNTERS, OMC, EMS NOKIA | HUAWEI | ERICSSON | ALCATEL-LUCENT Stats counters and call traces from network elements themselves can be fed into network monitoring systems. The vendors themselves have often sought out differentiation through their enhanced element management capabilities. One strategic question for operators and vendors will be how they deliver networkbased CEM across multi-vendor environments. Strategic alliances between NEPs have made little progress, while vendors often sell-in their own management systems (eg Nokia’s SmartAct, Alu’s Motive) as they sign infrastructure deals.

DRIVE AND WALK TEST ANITE | ASCOM | ROOTMETRICS | SWISSQUAL | GWS NETWORKS Anite’s Nemo series of test solutions include Nemo Outdoor for drive testing, Nemo Handy for in-building measurements and Nemo Walker Air for indoor benchmarking. Ascom is probably the leader in drive testing, with its TEMS portfolio. SwissQual is another company with a big background in this area. GWS provides network tests and uses tools from a variety of vendors. RootMetrics combines an element of crowd sourcing with professional teams of testers walking and testing specific locations.

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FEATURE: COMPANIES UNDER THE CEM UMBRELLA

FROM THE USERS: DIRECT CONTACT SPATIAL BUZZ | CARRIERIQ | METRICELL | PROCERA (APPLET) | OPENSIGNAL Companies such as OpenSignal, NetRadar, and RootMetrics offer publicly available apps that can test signal strength, throughput and the like. Integrating data like this into a CEM strategy is the challenge. Metricell works with operators to install reporting agents on selected devices and with certain users. SpatialBuzz structures its data so that it can pick up on where and when spikes of users are reporting issues - creating a customer-led picture of the network.

WEB CHAT FORUMS SOCIAL MEDIA AMDOCS The ability to monitor and respond to any channel on the web, in forums, chat sessions and across social media forms the “multi-channel” element of a CEM strategy and often closes the loop between data discovery, and responding to customers. Companies such as Amdocs offer an increasingly sophisticated array of multi-channel customer monitoring and engagement tools, to pick up on.

DATA ANALYSIS GUAVAS | MATRIXX | HP | IBM | ORACLE This is where the metal of Big Data hits the telco floor. All the major IT Big Data providers are eyeing the telco opportunity as a key vertical. Certainly the analytics piece of the network data being provided offers potential not just for enhanced customer experience management but for revenue opportunities in creating and developing new services.

DATA PRESENTATION AMDOCS | SPATIALBUZZ | TEKTRONIX COMMUNICATIONS Many of the same companies as we see in other areas but worth thinking of as a different section because here is where a lot of the “value” of the extraction, correlation and analysis of the network and subscriber data comes together. Platforms from the likes of SpatialBuzz, Polystar and Tektronix Communications are designed to create different outputs depending on the business department using the data - marketing, network operations, C-Suite or CRM teams. 14 TMN MARKET UPDATE

CROWD-SOURCED CEM TO CROWD-SHAPED NETWORKS Our cloud-based customer experience analytics and service monitoring platform helps to engage, monitor and improve customer and service experience 24/7/365 and in realtime. SpatialBuzz derives valuable operational insights by continuously monitoring activity across all customer touch-points, giving a unique crowd-sourced customer based view of network performance, an early-warning of emerging service issues, a benchmark of performance during and after major network changes and ultimately helping operators to implement crowd-shaped customer focussed decisions throughout their businesses. SpatialBuzz is one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fastest growing customer experience analytics and service monitoring companies and has produced multi award-winning CEM solutions for global Tier 1 mobile network operators.

Get in touch T: +44 (0) 1483 440568 E: enquiries@spatialbuzz.com W: www.spatialbuzz.com