“We saw a gap in the telecoms market in 2011.” Tanya Cheng of Huawei is talking exclusively to VanillaPlus in Shenzhen, China at the Huawei Analyst Summit 2016 (HAS2016).
“With the industry, including the TM Forum, focused on Service Quality Management (SQM) there were no solutions in the telecoms sector aimed directly at improving the customer experience,” maintains Huawei’s director of CEM Solution Marketing Operations, in the Service Strategy & Marketing Department.
So in 2012 the company began to act as a facilitator with analysts and industry groups, writes Jeremy Cowan. They were aiming to create a matrix of what software was needed, who within the network operators might want it, and where it should fit in network operations.
“From observing mobile broadband users and services we got a lot of operators asking how to handle complaints, especially from end users, and complaints about data service quality. They wanted to know how to handle customer complaint issues,” says Cheng. (Also see: How do I know if my customers are happy?)
Comparison with airline and hotel industries
“But we found it’s a big market. In other industries — insurance, hotel, airline — they have advanced methodologies. So we assessed best practice. We started from the operators’ requirements, then found that there was more and more we could do for them. We believed by word of mouth that communication service providers (CSPs) had greater opportunities in the enterprise market. They invested first in the consumer market because they have a great market share and most revenue came from there. Now some CSPs are more focused on enterprises,” she said.
Huawei now has 100 business contracts in CEM (customer experience management) globally. “We see operators trying more aggressively to offer new services in the enterprise market, such as IoT (Internet of Things). Before 2012 who offered CEM? Probe vendors? SQM (service quality management) vendors? Their capabilities were limited, monitoring typical parts of the network, and pre-2011 it wasn’t true CEM. Then three CT (communications technology) vendors announced CEM solutions. After 2011 supplier solutions were getting more and more mature. In 2012 many operators wanted integration; many had bought a lot of probes and they wanted us to take care of their legacies using their existing probes.”
What’s new in CEM?
“So what does your CEM solution do now?” VanillaPlus asked.
“Well, for example, the Network Departments bought probes for active monitoring of the network performance or service quality, for instance SMS. Nowadays the mainstream CEM solution providers can offer end-to-end data and traditional service quality monitoring, from voice to SMS or WeChat to WhatsApp. Now I can drill down and can give a troubleticket to the Wireless Optimisation team or the Core Network Optimisation team. It can demonstrate the end-to-end service quality and it can drill down to see which team or network element is responsible for that bad customer experience.
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