Bringing True Customer Experience Management into View
Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista
Attention to customer experience has become mission-critical for service providers attempting to navigate a successful course in the face of a competitive business environment, the burgeoning growth of bandwidth-hungry applications, and heightened end-user expectations. We continually hear that service providers moving toward a “customer experience management” model are seeking more in-depth information about the services their subscribers receive.
Ensuring that a customer gets quick delivery after requesting a new broadband service, or that a mobile subscriber can start downloading and synchronizing email shortly after registering for the service, is certainly a key component in managing the customer experience. But once a customer’s new service has been delivered, the challenge becomes making sure that the customer receives that service at a quality level they are going to be happy with. This makes continual monitoring in real time essential, complementing traditional but reactive fault-based systems by enabling focus on real-time customer experience issues.
All this points to a shift in the service assurance paradigm, positioning proactive, quality-aware performance management as the lead application in the operations center because it addresses quality and not just availability. In response, InfoVista recently introduced Vista360.
Vista360 is an operational and customer dashboard that allows service providers to truly engage customer experience management—leveraging a powerful technology platform. It’s a powerful and innovative Web 2.0 application that brings flexible and simplified management of operational and customer reporting. It enables a proactive performance-based approach to operational management of next-generation services.
With a Web 2.0 simple user interface and drag-and-drop functionality, customer service managers, executive management, and operations professionals can create custom, on-demand reports—without relying on IT or system administrators. This user-friendly interface and functionality also enables more granular awareness of potential impacts to quality of service, while improving total cost of ownership and customer satisfaction. I go into more detail on my video blog, which I invite you to visit.
In sum, a true customer experience management approach can only be brought into view by incorporating proactive performance management into the set of dashboard tools that operational teams and other stakeholders are looking at; because ultimately, the goal when it comes to customer services isn’t just availability, it’s having customers who are happy with the services they receive as well.
