In today's highly competitive mobile environment, the frantic search for the next killer application means that operators are feeling under intense pressure to rollout new data services regularly and to tight deadlines. The frenetic nature of this drive to make one's mark and exploit new opportunities to their fullest extent - before the competition can get there - has as its side-effect a tendency for new data services to suffer a certain lack of refinement when they are unleashed on the public.

Providers must recognise that attention to detail is a prerequisite if new services are to work smoothly. Failure to do so - and the constant pressure felt by operators to realise the promise of data revenues - has resulted in a reduction in pre-launch testing time and put more dependence on assurance systems.

Typically these assurance systems are based largely on past scenarios and are only as effective as one's ability to predefine problems. This model can work well for user problems experienced in running other services, but it fails to cater for the emergence of new difficulties that were previously unheard of in the support environment. Operators must strive to go a step further and anticipate problems before they arise. For operators, the challenge on this road is to understand what level of service the customer is currently receiving. There are people behind the scenes that do not know what the problems are so naturally it will be unable to resolve the situation until a customer notifies them. This is where the real problem lies. In today's marketplace customers are beginning to fight back, and mobile data users simply are not prepared to give operators a second chance.

In a recent study by NOP World in September 2005, more than half of the respondents admitted that if they encountered problems in using new mobile data services - including ring tones and gaming downloads - they would give up rather than seek assistance. These figures highlight the fact that customers are no longer willing to persevere with a service if it does not work, and will not be encouraged to do so again in the future. On top of this it also suggests that customers will be less likely to try any other or additional new services. This should be a genuine concern. Relying on customers to call and expecting them to tolerate failures is worse than risky - it can be suicidal.

Furthermore, a mere 2 per cent of the studies respondents claimed that they would proactively seek assistance from their operators should they encounter any problems. Customers are more likely to call on their friends for advice rather than contacting customer care. This means that adding additional services in order to generate more usage is not a solution. If one mobile data service does not work effectively, customers are likely to assume that others will not work, and consequently they may not make the effort of sampling new services at all. These findings make salutary reading for mobile operators, content providers and ISPs seeking to increase the take-up of mobile data services. The investment they are staking in call centres and self-care solutions is not paying off, as mobile phone use is often an impulsive activity and the majority of the public are not prepared to continue trying or seek help when the services fail to work.

To meet this challenge, operators need a holistic view of subscriber transactions to get to the root cause of previously unknown problems and resolve or prevent them before they can affect the customer experience. Identification of these unknown problems in real-time would dramatically cut the costs of supporting mobile services by reducing the number of problems affecting users. This in turn would enable operators to provide their customers with a more seamless service experience and to offer proactive customer care - opening the way to regain lost service revenue from active users, as well as increasing revenue from new subscribers. Thankfully, there exist means and ways of getting to grips with the everyday reality of the user experience and of assisting the operator to overcome these obstacles.

Some systems continuously and non-intrusively collect service experience data from log files, CDRs, error reports, profile database records and other sources. It is then possible to aggregate the data to construct an end-to-end view of the service experience for each individual service usage event. These aggregated events are analysed in order to identify service experience problems and trigger alerts for customer care, QoS or NOC personnel, outlining the nature of the experience problems in addition to a list of impacted customers.

This provides a tool for quick and effective investigation of the root cause of the problem and allows the operator to respond in near real time to problems. The operator is then able to take a proactive approach to customer care and ensure that the uptake and usage of mobile data services are boosted further. For example, by notifying a subscriber about a failure (such as a MMS that did not reach its destination) and explaining how to fix it before the subscriber is even aware of the problem the operator can turn a potentially negative experience into a positive one. When subscribers are accompanied more closely, especially when using new services, they will view the service in a more positive light, feeling more secure, and will be less likely to give up the service.

It should never be too late to assure service experience even after a new service has been rolled out. Understanding the mobile content experience from the end user's point of view can be the key to building a beautiful relationship with customers, and will ensure that the honeymoon period goes uninterrupted.

BIOS, Nov 30, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Mobile phone