Service Assurance for Virtual Networks

By: Gregg Hara

We are living in an age where we are faced with so many options and services, that customer experience plays an extremely important part of why we choose a service. When talking about the telecommunications market, the service assurance requirements demand much more flexibility and real-time responsiveness and automation to ensure the best possible customer experience.

According to research from Analysys Mason, customer experience is directly related to quality of service and the underlying network performance. The research results showed that 56% of CSPs believe network quality of service (QoS) influences customers’ willingness to recommend a CSP. Given this significant percentage, it is very apparent how much customer experience is impacted by network performance.

However, with today’s explosion of services via smartphones, Metro Ethernet, and cloud offerings, the number of alarm points to monitor has scaled to the millions, making a traditional approach to assurance not as efficient or effective. Older methods of troubleshooting and monitoring are becoming obsolete - a new model is needed that delivers continuous improvement to service quality and, ultimately, the customer experience.

In addition, as virtual services come online, even greater assurance capability and adaptability is required.  Businesses must be in the position to offer point-to-point and hierarchical network performance and service assurance solutions so that any performance issues are quickly identified, correlated and remediated. This will offer a seamless and high quality experience that will retain customers, as well as promote business growth.

Poor Network Performance Implications

Why should service providers be concerned with network performance? In today’s extremely competitive business environment, operators need to cost effectively keep customers’ business as well as upsell new services. In order to achieve this objective, there is a demand for IT and business process automation, continuous real-time monitoring and advanced analytics that provide contextual intelligence.

Existing legacy service assurance solutions have come to be extremely reactive. Businesses are often not aware of certain problems and issues at hand until a customer complaint or inquiry is received by the customer service team. But oftentimes, this is too late. What could have been addressed earlier is now taking much more time for resolution, and this has a direct, negative impact on customer experience levels.

To improve customer experience, as well as reduce opex, there needs to be a more proactive approach in place that helps operators align customer care with key business activities of customers. This proactive approach requires the use of strategic assurance that provides real-time insight into potential issues that might negatively impact quality of customer experience. That way operators can detect problems before they impact services and determine the best way to resolve the problem based on customer preferences.

Enhancing the Customer Experience

Enhancing and delivering the utmost in customer experience is crucial for operators as they are looking to win new business, in addition to sustaining the business they already have. To enhance customer experience, operators need to approach customer experience initiatives based on the best business case, profitability of customer, committed SLAs, penalty exposure and maximizing service quality.

Strategic assurance solutions are critical in these situations. They can serve to identify the source of poor performance that is affecting business, which will allow operators to prioritize corrective actions, decrease SLA breaches and minimize customer churn. In terms of enhancing the customer experience, strategic assurance helps operators think proactively and allows them to prepare for issues and and resolutions in advance.

Overall, strategic assurance enables operators to solve major challenges with an out-of-the-box solution that allows operators to focus time and resources on key business goals, including customer satisfaction, customer retention, and new customer acquisition. An integrated and holistic approach to assurance, strategic assurance is aligned with business process improvement. A strategic approach to service assurance provides real-time, actionable intelligence to decision makers that help them better understand and optimize their networks. Ultimately, strategic assurance will give operators the tools to build new business models that will enable them to differentiate themselves and expand their business.

SDN/NFV Takeover and the Need for Greater Service Assurance

CSPs need to make sure that the service they are providing to their customers is as seamless as possible resulting in the highest quality of service. Legacy assurance solutions have often struggled with translating network performance into how it affects service performance. This lack of understanding impacts the visibility of customer experience. With the roll-out of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) services, CSPs need to prepare themselves for these changes and how service assurance must change to ensure virtual service performance.