Big Data for Better Operations - The Use of Analytics in the Connected Home

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Big Data for Better Operations - The Use of Analytics in the Connected Home

By: Alan Marks, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions

The increasingly competitive broadband market has service providers facing new challenges as they deliver services to today’s Internet-connected home. One challenge is delivering technical support for the rapidly increasing number of Internet-connected devices in the home. Consumers are now connecting gaming consoles, smart phones, tablets and other devices to their residential gateway, and their broadband Internet service. In light of this increasingly complex and dynamic technological landscape, it is no surprise that service providers have turned to analytics to better understand their customers’ needs.

Gaining a 360° view of one’s customers via analytics is quickly becoming one of the only ways to provide a service that is differentiated from competitors. Customer Experience Management tools are being used to comprehensively manage a customer’s cross-channel exposure, interaction, and transactions with a company, with the ultimate goal of optimizing these interactions from the customer’s perspective and, as a result, fostering customer loyalty.

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On September 25, I will have the privilege of speaking at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver regarding the use of analytics to optimize the customer experience in the connected home. The Cable-Tec Expo is the cable telecommunications engineering show of the year. It provides the opportunity to discover and learn first-hand about the latest in cable telecommunications technology. I will be attending on behalf of the Alcatel-Lucent Motive team, with the objective of delivering information about our cutting edge products in the realm of customer experience analytics.

The array of devices being used in today’s connected home is generating a great deal of valuable information for service providers. This key data and analytics can be used by operators for managing the connected home in relation to:

  1. Home device connectivity, usage, and performance
  2. Online video quality of experience (QoE) assessment
  3. Internet security and malware protection, and
  4. Measurement, optimization, and continuous improvement of an operator’s customer care processes.

The ultimate goal of mining and transforming this data is to create meaningful, actionable insights that can be used to quickly identify anomalies and resolve issues.  As operators begin to apply analytics to the customer experience they will be able to create and maintain a culture of customer experience (CX) excellence that is aligned with CX business goals and metrics. Not only that, but they will gain the ability to manage the subscriber experience proactively and predictively in order to continuously improve customer care processes and technologies.

Essentially, the Motive CX analytics framework for optimizing the customer experience in the connected home can be broken down into four categories:

  • Home device and home network analytics enables operators to collect device and home network data, and use the resulting intelligence to proactively discover, diagnose, and resolve issues.
  • Online video analytics combines data from video player plug-ins, CDNs and QoE agents to measure subscriber QoE, and assess viewing trends, content usage, and CDN performance.
  • Security analytics helps to establish and maintain a safe home network environment by providing network-based analysis of Internet traffic for malware and protecting the network and subscribers. 
  • Care analytics leverages the wealth of intelligence embedded within customer care sessions and their associated workflow steps to create more efficient customer care processes.

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The conclusion is that the use of analytics can have a meaningful influence on subscriber retention and revenue if properly deployed. In my presentation, I will delve further into the above four categories to show you how to best harness device, network, and services data in the connected home  to extract valuable, actionable insights with speed and precision. With the churn rate at 89% for subscribers who have had a poor customer experience, more focus than ever needs to be paid to using analytics as a means of improving customer satisfaction and retention.

Hope to see you there!

Alan

 

 



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