 In the extraordinarily competitive telecom sector, customer satisfaction is the ultimate metric of success. The surest path to a strong business bottom line is assuring that customers receive the highest appropriate Quality of Service (QoS) across multiple applications and delivery mechanisms. At the same time, however, isolating and resolving technical problems across a complex telecom infrastructure, and evaluating them in the context of the customer experience, is no simple trick.
As a result, service assurance has evolved as a discipline along two paths. First, within service management, it has grown from rudimentary root cause analysis—based on element managers and low-level network interfaces—to a more sophisticated, integrated and mature function of Operations Support Systems (OSS).
Second, service assurance has grown in relevance across the organization, developing gradually into a key business intelligence source which delivers performance and service delivery analytics to even the highest level of the organizational hierarchy.
The Rise of Fault and Performance Management
Just as it has grown and matured, the essential theory and implementation of service assurance has seen significant change. The automation of fault management, for instance, became important when networks reached a level of maturity and complexity that rendered simple readouts useless. An analysis layer was required, and the fault management sector was born.
Similarly, it became clear that the robustness of network architectures meant that network fault events did not always translate directly into degraded network performance. Performance management, as a subsection of service assurance, was created to distinguish performance-impacting faults—those requiring a prioritized response—from lesser faults.
These two systems—fault management and performance management—have come to represent different views of network integrity and, considered as a whole, comprise a fairly comprehensive view of network robustness.
SQM Portrays Service Assurance from a Business Perspective
In the new millennium, a new school of thought has emerged: Service Quality Management (SQM). SQM seeks to present a comprehensive visualization of performance on a service basis, relating network performance to business objectives and assigning business costs to conditions that compromise the network or its services.
Over the same period, customer care has become far more sophisticated. For instance, today’s service providers must optimize service levels in cases of high-value enterprise customers. Analytics and business intelligence tools have been deployed toward that end, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are now commonly offered to address billing, care and other contract items. SQM thus represents a more business-centric perspective on service assurance, one which ties the quality objectives of service delivery at the OSS to business level objectives at the SLA level.
As SQM continues to evolve, however, its shortcomings have become evident as well. For instance, there is no way within the construct of conventional SQM to understand the relative value of a given service to the service provider—or to customers themselves.
Similarly, ostensibly “end-to-end” service management has commonly omitted the true end of the service delivery path: the user. A service may be delivered perfectly until the last stop in the logical chain, but if the device upon which it is ultimately rendered is not functioning properly—for example, because of a firmware glitch—that essential fact may not be reported properly to the provider. Service, in this context, has been delivered, but not truly assured.
Similarly, a limited assurance infrastructure that extends merely to the core network can overlook service degradations of specific services in specific locations, perhaps at specific times of the day. In addition, customer groups themselves have specific attributes and demographics that must be addressed as a marketing function when deciding how new services are brought to the market.
Enter: Customer Experience Management
Understanding how services perform is not enough. Driving business through assurance requires customer-centric monitoring of multiple aspects of the total customer engagement.
The answer? Customer Experience Management (CEM), which might be characterized as the next logical generation of SQM. CEM truly connects the monitoring and assurance functions of the OSS to business objectives—ultimately leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and a stronger business bottom line.
Furthermore, IBM has, in recent years, emerged as a key player in the nascent CEM market. The technology brought to the IBM Tivoli system management portfolio with the recent acquisitions of Vallent and Micromuse has enabled IBM to pioneer the development of CEM as a mechanism for understanding the relevance of services to customers and delivering true, valuable intelligence about customer behaviour and service adoption across multiple dimensions. For the first time, service providers can truly begin to understand what their customers are actually doing—tracking, quantifying, and optimizing the customer experience.
One clear example of IBM’s leadership in CEM is apparent in the recently-released IBM Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Manager, a solution that utilizes multiple data sources to create an exceptionally accurate picture of service performance. Thanks to its Customer Experience Management capabilities, service providers will find that Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Manager is the premier service assurance solution.
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