Are Mobile Operators Really Committed to Customers?

The answer may surprise you...or maybe not

By Edward J. Finegold

Though customer churn sounds like a stomach ailment caused by dropped mobile calls, it's actually the greatest threat to any mobile operator's profitability. Given that it costs operators roughly $300 dollars to acquire each subscriber - and many months to recover that cost - it doesn't take an advanced degree in mathematics to understand why reducing churn is a top priority for operators worldwide. Combining this with their focus on selling data offerings to corporate customers, it's not surprising that mobile operators claim they are increasing their focus on guaranteeing QoS and improving the end-to-end customer experience.

Claiming to have lofty service management goals is easy. Achieving those goals is extremely difficult, especially considering that mobile operators typically focus on network technology and not at all on sharing information about what's happening from the customer's perspective. Operators are taking some small steps to build the some of the infrastructure they need to make a shift toward more customer-centric operations. But they still have fundamental problems that will undermine their efforts, and its not clear that they are truly committed to making things better for customers.

A Mobile SLA is Often an Empty Contract
The connection between new data offerings and customer churn is relatively simple, and is particularly evident in corporate offerings. "The large business customers have said 'we'll send our sales people out to run a trial,' but at the end they say 'nope, we're not confident you can manage our data services,' and then they leave for another carrier and take all of their voice revenue - as much as 95 percent of the whole - with them," says Kieran Moynihan, CTO of Watchmark-Comnitel, an OSS provider focused on improving service management for mobile operators. New data offerings, and the service management promises attached to them, have as much to do with retaining customers and their voice-driven dollars as they have to do with increasing services and revenue.

The key to winning data business is clearly an ability to offer something akin to what landline providers offer in the form of quality guarantees. Service level agreements (SLAs) have been in place in the landline world for several years and have become increasingly detailed to each customer account. For mobile operators, however, SLAs are a totally new concept and something they aren't eager to offer. "Most mobile operators don't want to offer SLAs because mobile is a best effort type of service, but with business data services SLAs are critical," says Justin Strong, product marketing manager for Agilent Technologies' service management product line, which is widely deployed among mobile operators, particularly in Europe.

Not only are mobile operators somewhat reluctant to roll out SLAs, they also aren't sure exactly what measurements to report or what levels of service they need to guarantee. "I don't think the mobile operators have figured out what to offer in their SLAs yet," says Paul Turner, vice president of product management for ADC Telecommunications' Metrica product line. ADC's Metrica NPR performance management product is installed in more than 210 network providers globally and is often part of the foundation upon which mobile operators' service assurance processes are built. "Part of the problem," he says, "is that this is not a connected world inside the mobile operators. The sales departments are selling SLAs, but the people responsible for managing them are not even involved in that process." If mobile operators are offering SLAs with virtually nothing behind them, their motives become highly suspect. It would seem to be more about telling the customer what they want hear than offering improved services for the right reasons.

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