By: Jesse Cryderman
How intelligent are your business operations?
When a San Francisco Giant's game ends in the 94107 zip code, can you detect in real time, which of your customers will be affected by the inevitable post-game cellular traffic, alert them, and drive them to your local Wi-Fi hotspot? Can you proactively improve loyalty and offer up sell options with pre-emptive, real-time messaging to customers traveling by train through a known network problem zone in Edinburgh? No?
These examples highlight an increasingly critical problem: Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are very good at understanding the network from the inside—but what does it look like from the customers' perspective?
Like most service providers, chances are you are leveraging traditional service assurance (find faults by alarm, measure device performance, react to minimize downtime). Indeed, traditional service assurance enables CSPs to ensure quality of service, but by its nature, this network-centric approach is blind to the customers' point of view.
Put simply, smartphones, and their accompanying customer service expectations, call for smart operations. And Operational Intelligence is poised to fill this need.
Benefits of Operational Intelligence vs. Traditional Service Assurance
A maxim of Operational Intelligence is: You can't fix what you can't see.
Traditional service assurance is largely a reactive affair; it relies on fault-detection, alarm analysis, and network-based responses. It can provide granular network and device analytics, but cannot correlate these data sets with equally valuable customer data. And without visibility into the myriad touch points along the customer experience continuum, and with no way of connecting the siloed data in a meaningful way, there's no way of knowing which network issues are affecting customer experience the most, nor the kinds of problems customers are seeing in the field.
Operational Intelligence is primarily a proactive solution, analyzing real-time data, events, and the status business processes from multiple sources (network performance, service delivery, inventory, location, real-time user experience, payment, billing and usage) to create dynamic profiles of customer experience risks and opportunities. Operational Intelligence enables CSPs to view and analyze their operations from the outside in, and offers three key capabilities:
- Visibility of the customer experience in real time, by integrating both network and customer data.
- Insight into actual network performance versus the customers' expected performance.
- Action in the form of automated responses to error conditions and empowerment to resolve problems before they become visible to the customer.
Operational Intelligence taps into all of the fast-moving data, events and processes, aggregates and displays these metrics in real-time, analyzes problems, and identifies solutions. As a result, operators can initiate immediate action that has a significant impact on the customer experience. In short, service assurance optimizes network reliability; Operational Intelligence maximizes customer experience.
