Next Generation Communications - A New Conversation Experience Archives

Seven Steps to Assess Eco-Impact of ICT

2012-07-22T22:00:05Z

By Susan J. Campbell

As much as we have come to rely on communications technologies to stay connected and streamline business processes, those providing the access must still pay attention to the impact on the environment. Eco-sustainability in fact is emerging not just as an issue of being a good corporate neighbor, but as important for being a preferred provider of products and services. This is why it has become important that the telecommunications industry use a uniform protocol for measuring the eco-impact of its services and networks.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent TechZine article, Seven Steps to Greater Green House Gas Awareness in ICT, explored this topic. It highlights the new global standards designed to create a unified approach to the measurement of green house gas emissions. Focus is on current life cycle assessment tools such as those developed by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) which can be employed by ICT vendors, particularly the telecom ones, for estimating the eco-impact of services and/or networks in a meaningful and actionable way.

The good news is that current approaches offer flexibility in terms of the available data and the business purpose of assessments. Thus, by adhering to specified guidelines, service providers are able to more effectively and efficiently pinpoint potential problem areas, report on improvements and maintain best practices that can impact the environment.

A brief review of the ALU’s seven steps for doing a comprehensive assessment is instructive:

Define the business purpose of the assessment – each scenario may be different necessitating the need to clearly define the business purpose at the outset.
Define the scope – include a review of all equipment used, operational activities and a description of the function of the service.
Identify life cycle stages of the network, service or product – two stages are likely to exist: the embodied stage, or manufacturing, distribution, installation and end of life, and the use stage where the service is used and maintained.
Establish an inventory – measurements must be established for both the use and embodied stages.
Review allocation – multiple services may be sharing telecom equipment, or a single service is shared across multiple networks. An appropriate distribution of the emissions must be allocated to a specific service or network in the assessment process.
Selecting a calculation model – this should be suited to the specific business purpose, as well as to the quality and amount of information available in the process.
Completing the calculations – detailed recommendations on the calculation of emissions are included in the ICT Sector Guidance of the GHG Protocol Standards. Guidelines are organized according to service platform, customer domain and operational activities.

Those familiar with the next generation communications online community are probably aware from reading the featured articles and blogs of the past few years of ALU’s commitment doing well by doing good. From the top down, the company takes seriously not only its responsibilities to be a good steward of the earth’s resources, but its belief that its solutions should enable its customers to have a strong eco-sustainability strategy so they can do likewise, and that doing so is good for business as well as the environment.

Under the category that you can’t fix or improve what you cannot measure accurately, having the best tools and the right strategy for doing comprehensive eco-impact assessments is an important part of making sure ICT’s contribution to eco-sustainability it optimal. The TechZine article is a good place to start for obtaining detailed information on the seven steps, as well as the next steps you company may wish to institute to be a better environmental steward.

Motive Mobile Device Manager Key to Better and More Cost-Effective Customer Experiences

2012-07-16T00:55:36Z

By Mae Kowalke

The customer service challenge for cellular providers is clear.

Numerous research firms have recently published studies estimating that smartphones currently make up half of all mobile phone purchases globally and that number is expected to reach 75 percent by 2013. This is context for what is a vexing industry challenge. It turns out that more than half of all customer service calls to mobile service operators now deal with the difficult technical problems that can come from smartphones, such as mobile internet, and 63 percent of returned phones are not actually faulty.

In fact, a recent Yankee Group study notes that technical difficulties now represent a bigger percentage of call center volume than billing issues. They also represent a huge financial drain on operators. A single support call, for example, can cost a provider roughly a month’s worth of customer profit. This means finding ways to effectively address device configuration and service provisioning is more crucial than ever.

Alcatel-Lucent has just released the latest version of its new Mobile Device Manager (MDM) to address this type of challenge, as part of its Motive Customer Experience Solutions package. MDM provides over-the-air detection, configuration and provisioning of a wide range of mobile devices including Apple and Android operating systems, and it works across 2G, 3G and 4G wireless networks.

David Stevenson, VP and General Manager of Motive Customer Experience Solutions at Alcatel-Lucent noted at the recent MDM introduction that, “With Alcatel-Lucent’s portfolio of Motive customer experience solutions – of which the Mobile Device Manager is a fundamental building block – we can reduce average handle times of service desk calls with at least 10 percent and increase successful software updates with a factor of 10.” He added: “This translates into less operational costs for mobile service providers, and happier and more loyal consumers.”

In addition to MDM, six other components make up the overall Motive Mobile Device Manager solution:

Motive Mobile Device Support Template

WDS Automatic Device Detection Manager
WDS Mobile Device Content Subscription
Motive Self-Service Console
Motive Service Management Platform, and Motive Customer Service Console

The Motive Mobile Device Support Template performs over-the-air diagnosis and resolution of mobile device service issues by using data from MDM, while the WDS Automatic Device Detection Manager lets mobile service providers detect and identify mobile devices when they appear on the network.

The Motive Customer Service Console is a robust customer care interface for customer service reps, and Motive Self-Service Console is a web-based subscriber-facing tool that lets customers self-diagnose and resolve mobile device issues. This is tied together with the Motive Service Management Platform, which is a service management platform that connects MDM, the self-service console and the customer-service console with the operator’s OSS/BSS framework.

Alcatel-Lucent also offers the WDS Mobile Device Content Subscription, which is a subscription service that “ensures access to up-to-date device configuration settings that have been tested against the Motive MDM server to effectively activate and manage the mobile devices on their network, accurately.

Time is money, particularly in the case of the efficient and effective management of customer interactions by mobile service provider contact center and technical support people. Ensuring that customer conversations are compelling as well as economical requires a combination of things including proper training, skills-based routing and ensuring that the right tools are used to measure those experiences so that data can be turned into knowledge and knowledge into actions that create value. Managing devices is a critical part of this equation which is why a comprehensive approach to device management such as the Motive portfolio is something that is already drawing industry attention.

The War Will be Won over Customer Experience

2012-07-02T19:14:49Z

By Mae Kowalke

The battle for the best mobile device portfolio steals the headlines with its flashy array of smartphone offerings. However, increasingly it appears that the war will be won by the mobile broadband operator who provides the best customer experience as enabled by overall quality of experience (QoE) on their network.

“To thrive in today’s competitive mobile broadband market, service providers must deliver superior QoE and enrich the customer experience,” noted Greg Owens, director of marketing for customer experience at Alcatel-Lucent, in a recent Enriching Communications article, “Customer Insights Improve Business Performance, stated that, “With growing pressure to reduce churn and increase revenues, service providers need to have a better understanding of how customers use their services.”

Churn and cost reduction are key drivers in the mobile broadband provider’s push for improved QoE. It costs U.S. service provider about $400 to acquire a mobile customer, and churn rates average between 30 and 50 percent, according to Owens. That means spending roughly $120-200 million each year to replace 300,000-500,000 customers for a provider with a million customers. With that kind of money on the table, one of the best ways to grow is clearly to find ways to reduce churn, and improving QoE is critical.

But what exactly is QoE? It can be difficult to define. The standard definition is network quality and performance, which do still count. That said, network quality is only part of the equation for mobile broadband providers seeking a more competitive QoE. It is not just about network metrics it is also about how customers actually experience the network.

That’s where increased analytics and services such as Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Analytics (CXA), part of the company’s larger suite of Motive Customer Experience Solutions for mobile broadband providers, come into play.

The CXA solution helps strengthen the QoE and customer experience by enabling providers to extract real-time QoE data from many different sources, including network elements, customer relationship management tools and operations support systems; correlate, analyze and transform customer experience data into relevant business intelligence; generate actionable reports and dashboards from the data; and realize the full value of churn through making the data available to other system applications.

“Analytics can be used to identify a faulty cell where a large number of high value customers are located,” Owens said. “The engineering or network operations group can then put priority on the resolution of that network fault because it has a large financial impact. They can even take an additional step to message those customers impacted by that issue.”

He added: “Proactive support helps customers enjoy a better QoE while reducing their propensity to churn.”

Owens recommended three strategies mobile broadband operators should employ when seeking better QoE and customer experience.

Adopt a holistic approach: Use big data from across the company to gain a more complete understanding of customers and how they interact with the services and the network.

Break down internal barriers: As a corollary to the first point, a cultural change needs to take place where service providers eliminate the lack an ability or willingness for internal groups to share customer experience data across networks and organizational domains. The silos need to come down.

Develop a clear vision: Success can only be achieved if there is buy-in and direction from the executive level. The good news is that more and more service providers recognize this need and are putting senior executives in charge of customer experience programs.

At the end of the day, in a world where services are becoming more and more of a commodity, it is clear that to those who provide compelling experiences —how customers interact with services as well as service people and business processes and practices —win. It is equally clear that those who do not choose to make improved customer experiences a top priority do so at their own peril.

The Mobile Customer Experience Imperative

2012-06-25T15:57:10Z

By: Susan Campbell

Mobile service providers throughout the world are in an interesting competitive situation. The service provided is becoming a commodity by consumers. This means that true differentiation in this market going forward will be driven by customer experience transformations, such as those enabled by Alcatel-Lucent’s portfolio of Motive Customer Experience Solutions, as traditional approaches prove to be increasingly ineffective.

Market realities today are that consumers tend to avoid brand loyalty when considering services delivered and even price points when there is little differentiation. As a result, mobile service providers by competitive necessity must pay particular attention to establishing exceptional customer experiences if they hope to achieve business success. The focus must be on building trust with customers over time and increasing customer perceptions of the value of the customer experience, rather than leveraging services and products.

Alcatel-Lucent s recently shared its view on this in a piece entitled, “Customer Experience Transformation: The Mobile Customer Experience Imperative.” It highlights these market changes and what service providers need to be thinking about in order to be correctly positioned for success.

The situation is clear: potential new mobile subscriber rates are declining, consumer willingness to pay is changing, price points tend to vary little among dominate players and few advantages exist among different networks, devices or applications in terms of operator abilities to provide meaningful and sustainable differentiation.

With these challenges established, service providers cannot rely on traditional marketing strategies and tactics. The reasons are clear, new and more advanced handsets and advances in network capabilities no longer offer true points of differentiation, and complex offers are too difficult to understand and manage to be effective. At the same time, unique market positions have failed to emerge from the applications and services provided by third party developers.

But what does improving the customer experience entail? For starters it means having a comprehensive and deep understanding of:

The different key customer segments
Each customer touch point location and interaction opportunity
Perceptions of these touch points and interactions
The metrics behind customer transactional behavior
The ability to discern the overall value of the customer experience in the context of buying decisions.

What this translates into is that service providers hoping to dominate the market will need to implement a strategy of continuous improvement that is built on actions that are designed to deliver the improved customer experience all the way through the customer experience transformation.

As mentioned above, such a strategy needs the types of tools in Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions which enable service providers to use an extensive set of subscriber management data products. The goal of such solutions is to retrieve, integrate, consolidate, unify and provide access to key customer data.

In an era of big data, where business insights are gained from breaking down silos of information across operations so that multiple client applications can use the resulting data for actionable insights, the benefits are be substantial by providing:

Increased service personalization
Simplified customer interactions
Improved business relevance
Reduced development and integration costs for solutions and services

All of these leads to happier and more loyal customers, along with the reduction in costs resulting from business process automation, and ultimately increased profitability.

It might be possible given all of the financial constraints of today’s challenging competitive environment to focus time and attention on incremental approaches to improving what has worked in the past. However, reality is that the marketplace is dictating that it is imperative for service providers to use emerging solutions to get a handle on what will be the major way of increasing sustainable differentiated value in the future, and that is an intense attention to the transforming the way they deliver services and interact with customers.

With customer experience transformation now on service providers’ critical path to success, having the right and best information for using business intelligence to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions and exploit new opportunities to their fullest is key. This is not just about asking the right questions, it is about getting actionable information that enables companies to be both fast and best in the market.

Customer Experience in the Spotlight

2012-06-18T14:52:19Z

Greg Owens, Director, Customer Experience Solutions Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent

Customers have growing expectations for mobile broadband services. Better networks, broader device support, ubiquitous connectivity and competitive prices remain essential, but they’re no longer enough to keep customers coming back for more. Today’s mobile customers demand a superior customer experience, one that focuses on making it easy to discover, use and enjoy applications, devices and services.

Service providers are feeling the pressure to deliver on these expectations.

A renewed focus on QoE

Rising smartphone use is thrusting quality of experience (QoE) back into the spotlight. Smartphones appeal to users because they promise easy access to e-mail, apps, social networking and video. But smartphones have hidden complexities. Many users struggle with smartphone setup, app configuration, usage tracking and connectivity.

The end result is that smartphone users are turning to service providers more often — with problems that take more time to resolve.

Research by Alcatel-Lucent and WDS highlights the challenges associated with smartphone support:

Average handle time is currently 15 minutes for smartphone issues — 28% more than for feature phone issues.
A full 30% of smartphone problems even take more than a day to resolve.
Follow-up calls are frequent as well: 43% of smartphone problems require two or more interactions with the help desk.

This isn’t what customers expect when they sign their smartphone contracts.

Avoiding aggravation at the help desk

Service provider help desks should be reliable sources of quick answers and effective solutions. Great help desk experiences can enhance QoE and strengthen customer–provider relations. But despite providers’ efforts, the help desk often remains a source of aggravation for many (smartphone) users.

The main problem is that help desk agents aren’t always equipped to deliver fast, reliable solutions. Many lack easy access to timely intelligence about devices, applications, services and networks. They hunt for solutions manually — often across dozens of systems — or escalate issues to higher-tier support. For customers, the end effects are long wait times, frequent transfers and repeat calls.

What customers expect from support

So what kind of support do (smartphone) customers expect from service providers? The answers are straightforward:

They want quick and effective solutions that let them enjoy their devices and services.
They want to feel confident that their providers understand their unique problems, interests and needs.
Above all, they want to feel like they’re always in control of the customer experience.
The best support keeps customers connected to — and in control of — their devices, services, applications and content. From a customer perspective an ideal support offer includes:
Personalized support that solves problems quickly and simplifies service and app configuration
Access to the same QoE through every support channel —phone, chat, self-care, on-device help apps and social networking
Proactive support that fixes problems before they become apparent

Knowledge helps service providers deliver

Service providers have in-depth knowledge of customers, devices, services and networks. This puts them in an ideal position to deliver the enhanced support and simple experiences customers want. The challenge is to make this knowledge available to the right stakeholders and systems at every point of customer interaction.

Systems that deliver the right tools, information and visibility to the right places at the right times can dramatically improve the customer experience. With support backed by data-driven insights, customers can:

Engage with agents who know what services, devices and apps they use, and who can identify problems, solutions and new opportunities in real time. This cuts handling time and gets customers back on track faster.

Get support on all services from one well-informed source. This reduces escalations and transfers, and saves customers the trouble of explaining their concerns to agents who can’t actually address them.

Access automated configuration capabilities or apps that instantly connect them with the help desk using their channel of choice. This can eliminate complex configuration issues and allow customers to get support at their convenience.

All of these things can inspire customer satisfaction. Customers can feel confident that they can solve problems on their own or get help from someone who understands what they’re experiencing. The end results are fewer and shorter help desk calls, less frustration and more time for enjoyment and discovery.

Beyond the help desk

The relevance of data doesn’t stop at the help desk. With effective data mining and analysis, service providers can use their knowledge of customers to enhance and optimize many aspects of the customer experience.

For example, providers can apply their knowledge of customer usage data to present customers with valuable incentives — like unlimited mobile video downloads in off-peak hours at no additional cost — delivering more value for money. They can draw on similar knowledge to empower the help desk to extend compelling targeted offers. Or, they can use it to confirm that customers are getting the best possible value from their mobile packages.

Service providers can combine customer, network and usage insights to take a more proactive and positive approach to bandwidth management. For instance, to offset unpopular bandwidth and usage caps, providers can give customers compelling real-time opportunities to try different consumption patterns. These could include dynamic data pricing or free streaming of content sponsored by content providers.

Data-driven insights can also influence customer experience in more subtle ways, such as preventing bill shock. With the right insights, service providers can watch for abnormally high usage or billing charges in special conditions such as international roaming. They can then trigger alerts to offer transparency and choices that prevent undesirable surprises.

Getting “motivated” about customer experience

Alcatel-Lucent’s recently launched portfolio of Motive Customer Experience Solutions (CSX) addresses the concerns outlined above. The CXS portfolio helps service providers forge stronger and more valuable customer relationships and foster long-lasting brand loyalty by building customer-focused improvements into their products and services.

Customer Experience Management Key to Mobile Services Differentiation

2012-06-03T22:41:46Z

By Susan Campbell

The mobile broadband services market has become almost hyper-competitive globally. And, it has become increasingly clear that providing superior quality of experience (QoE) to customers, end users as well as third parties, will likely be a (if not the most) critical element in creating sustainable and profitable differentiated value. As a result, mobile service provider investment attention needs to be focused not just on delivering speeds and feeds but also on all aspects of QoE. A holistic approach for concentration on customer care¸ such as the Alcatel-Lucent portfolio of Motive Customer Experience solutions, fits the needs for making sure the best possible user experiences can be provided, monitored and constantly improved.

Why customer care, and why a comprehensive approach?

The reason is that a holistic approach to customer care is a fundamental tool for reducing vital churn rates. The bottom line is the bottom line here. Service providers (SPs) have the opportunity to make better use of the subscriber and network data to help not only make customers more loyal but also improve average revenue per user (ARPU) based on establishing a relationship that customers view as more “trusted.” In fact, if done correctly, they can leverage the provisioning of compelling customer experiences into a powerful tool for making satisfied customers enthusiastic brand advocates.

All of the elements of a holistic approach to QoE and the benefits it is capable of providing are highlighted in a recent Alcatel-Lucent Enriching Communications article, Managing the Mobile Customer Experience.

Let’s face it. Customers today expect their mobile networks today to deliver a high-performance and secure always on/all ways connected experience to their legacy and new bit-hungry personal devices. Everywhere, every time access to rich multimedia services and advanced applications is table stakes.

This presents a huge challenge and opportunity of mobile service providers around the world. Did you know, for example, that smartphones now account for 27 percent of all phones throughout the world, according to VisionMobile. Projections are they will represent 75 percent in the near future and certainly the vast majority of new phone sales. Plus, the explosive tablet market is driving a revolution in interactive multimedia apps which all need to themselves provide end users quality experiences if they are to succeed. They in essence will live or die based on the ability of the networks they rely on to deliver what they promise.

Reality is that it is not enough to simply recognize the fact that traffic in general is exploding as more devices are attached to the global networks. The nature of that traffic is also radically changing. Multimedia apps, and the use of streamed and real-time interactive video, presents a rising storm of data that already is straining mobile networks capacity in many places as well as the signaling networks that enable them to manage the new complexity.

As the article points out this is the proof case for why SPs, especially in the face of strong competition, need to invest now in efficiently and effectively managing the customer experience with solutions like Motive in order to set themselves apart in a world that is changing very rapidly.

SPs offering mobility are currently struggling to find their place between over-the-top (OTT) providers and customers. As the industry grows and evolves, complexity is bring added to the mix with new operating systems, configurations and applications. As a result, complex technologies are being made available to inexperienced customers, increasing the challenge of delivering a satisfying experience at a reasonable cost.

Management of QoE means improving such things as: first call resolution, the provision of self-diagnostic and self-care solutions, the clarification of offered services and how they are billed, and the delivery of a consistent experience across every customer interaction.

In taking the holistic approach to the customer experience, can target their position in the value chain and reinforce it in the mind of the consumer. Leveraging a holistic approach to customer experience management helps in the process by extending QoE to every touch point throughout the entire customer experience.

At the end of the day, value creation and competitive sustainability are based on trust, and trust is engendered by improved relationships between buyers and sellers which can only be the result of how buyers experience and SPs people, products, services and processes. That is what a holistic approach to QoE management is all about. It is the path to growth and profits instead of to commoditization .

Growing the Pay-TV Industry: It's Time for Disruptive Thinking!

2012-05-29T12:46:46Z

By: Wim Van Daele, PMP
Director, Communications – Motive CxS Portfolio, mCommerce & IP Video Solutions

For far too long, the pay-TV industry has been hanging on to legacy infrastructures and traditional business models. Few people are raising the one question that really matters: will today’s practices allow us to face the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow?

Guess what? They won’t. To secure growth in this established market, a more disruptive and unbiased thinking is required. Alcatel-Lucent embraces this new, open mindset - while marrying it to a staged and economically viable migration scenario.

As a starting point, three key thoughts/questions for your consideration:

What is the hardest thing to get right when building a new IP video service?

Is it all about “scaling” – as most vendors claim? Well, scaling is indeed an important element: in the near future, every connected device is to get a personalized, unicast video feed. The big question, however, is whether networks can scale sufficiently by hanging on to traditional broadcasting practices. That is why Alcatel-Lucent suggests a staged migration to a more scalable architecture – with minimal business disruption and reduced investment waste. No more hanging on to legacy infrastructures, while acknowledging that financial prudence dictates they can’t simply be turned off either.

Or, at least, not yet…

What are some of the most exciting, recent trends in the IP video space?

There’s more to it than just delivering a common end-user video experience across multiple screens. We think the most significant trend is the rapid adoption of smart devices with a lot of processing power. Again, the big question is how to leverage their capabilities and intelligence to build more scalable and economical pay-TV networks. Can they incorporate some of the capabilities that currently sit somewhere else in the network, for instance?

What are the major challenges thrown up by second-screen experiences?

There is no more such thing as a technology challenge; it is really about business enablers and economics. It is about content protection and delivering/managing a consistent, high-quality experience – through on-net CDNs, for instance.

At the end of the day it is about changing the conversation with the end user to assure a stronger, more compelling and durable relationship. Alcatel-Lucent can do this: we architect the network for high-quality video and have the expertise to build and integrate it. Moreover, service providers need to have the tools in place, like the Alcatel-Lucent portfolio of Alcatel-Lucent Motive Customer Experience Solutions, to manage, analyze and optimize the customer experience in a flexible, extensible and responsive manner. It is time for some disruptive thinking!

A New Conversation Experience: Alcatel-Lucent's 4G Consumer Communications Solution

2012-05-14T14:15:32Z

Beecher Tuttle

Subscriber demand for more innovative, bandwidth-hungry services has driven most every service provider to build a 4G LTE network capable of providing greater capacity, reduced latency and improved pricing. But to unlock the power of a 4G LTE investment – and to continue to deliver revenue-generating voice and messaging services – carriers must look to embrace Voice over LTE (VoLTE), a core component for a new set of rich media and collaboration services that also enables operators to deliver voice without having to rely on legacy 2G/3G networks.

In short, VoLTE helps service providers capitalize on their new 4G investments. VoLTE enables operators to offload legacy infrastructure and to deliver data simultaneously with crisp HD voice. By blending mobile voice with video, converged IP messaging, the web and social networking, service providers can create new revenue-generating communication services that differentiate them from competitors. The technology is also proven to harmonize conversations across disparate providers, devices and apps.

But perhaps more than anything, VoLTE provides operators with the flexibility to respond to ever-changing technologies, market conditions and user demands. The competitive freedoms of VoLTE allow operators to experiment with and deliver new communication features for broad markets and even strategic industries like mobile healthcare.

VoLTE also provides an avenue for operators to partner with application developers to deliver the best user experience at the lowest cost per bit, solidifying their position in the value chain.

"Regardless of where technology, regulation and competition take the industry in the coming years, VoLTE operators’ investment enables them to act decisively," say Alcatel-Lucent, a leading provider of VoLTE technologies.

Voice

In addition to providing a pathway for new converged services, VoLTE acts as a business necessity for delivering voice services via 4G networks, rather than continuing to deliver voice and messaging over legacy 2G/3G networks – an interim solution that doesn't take advantage of the power of LTE.

VoLTE is the long-term industry-designated solution for delivering voice and SMS messaging – two revenue-generating services that have stringent requirements that all-IP mobile networks can't meet.

Unlike temporary solutions such as circuit switched fallback (CSFB) and simultaneous voice and LTE (SV-LTE), which can't enable all-IP communication services like video calls or WebRTC, VoLTE tightly links the voice application to the LTE network, assuring the best subscriber experience in terms of performance, reliability, interoperability and global roaming.

With VoLTE, operators can provide new revenue-generating services such as video-communications and converged IP messaging while still delivering key mobile features like global roaming, global interoperability and a global ecosystem of smartphones and tablets, says Alcatel.

How does VoLTE optimize LTE investments?

Unlike 2G and 3G networks, VoLTE provides seamless IP connectivity between a subscriber’s devices and the Packet Data Networks (PDNs), resulting in improved spectral efficiency, higher bandwidth, reduced latency and Quality of Service (QoS) for new and legacy communication services.

The VoLTE application provides industry-leading reliability for conversational voice, real-time gaming, IMS signaling, and buffered and live streaming video. Other service differentiators include:

Graceful handover of in-progress voice calls from VoLTE (packet) to 2G/3G (circuit)
Emergency calling (for example, a subscriber’s call for help to police)
Intelligent Network (IN) service migration
Short message service (SMS) over IP
IMS centralized services

These features give application developers reason to partner with service providers and gain a share of their revenue. For more technical information on how VoLTE enables these functions, check out Alcatel Lucent's most recent addition to its white paper library, Voice Over LTE: The New Mobile Voice.

Path to VoLTE

Enablers like Alcatel-Lucent acknowledge that the path to VoLTE is a serious undertaking that relies heavily on the readiness of an operator's 4G LTE network as well as their competitive situation.

"The VoLTE operator must have purchased 4G LTE spectrum that covers critical markets, and they must have deployed or have a firm plan to deploy 4G LTE’s radios, mobile backhaul, packet core and so on," says Alcatel. "The VoLTE deployment is comparably small when compared to the rest of 4G LTE, yet it too must be done well in order to assure subscribers’ service and win their business."

Before deploying VoLTE, service providers must first consider:

IN Services: Operators must develop a plan to migrate their IN services from legacy networks to 4G infrastructures. For more information on this topic, check out the IN Services Migration white paper from Alcatel.
Consistent roaming: Without standards, business agreements and interconnections being finalized, operators need to employ an interim roaming strategy. The most optimum path available is the circuit switched copycat method, which relies on Local Breakout (LBO) to expeditiously route voice traffic.
Voice call continuity: The majority of operators use SR-VCC or eSR-VCC. Click on this Alcatel white paper for more information.
Device ecosystem: With the help of early VoLTE adopters, Alcatel-Lucent has been testing and preparing for the launch of VoLTE-capable devices.

The Alcatel-Lucent advantage

As described above, VoLTE deployments hold tremendous value for service providers that rely on 4G LTE infrastructures to drive their business into the future. But to take full advantage of VoLTE, operators must first analyze their current competitive situation and assess their technical assets to ensure an efficient and cost-effective deployment.

Service providers need a partner with the technical expertise to help them with a smooth execution, especially considering commercial VoLTE rollouts are only just beginning. Alcatel-Lucent and its 4G Consumer Communications solution have been at the heart of most every major VoLTE trial, assuring next-gen voice, video and messaging services with the highest level of performance, reliability and service interoperability.

The graphic below illustrates Alcatel-Lucent’s end-to-end approach to LTE.

Alcatel-Lucent's New Conversion Experience enables operators to deliver:

A better user experience: Mobile subscribers can enjoy video, voice and messaging using any combination of device, screen and network.

Connected communities: By harmonizing communications across telecom and web-based networks. Users can easily contact friends and family over social networks. And, through WebRTC, operators can extend their services to anyone with a web browser.

Open for innovation: The solution has easy to use, open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to attract application developers with additional features that inspire and accelerate new conversation services and collaboration.

Click here to learn more about Alcatel-Lucent's "New Conversion Experience." And, for additional information, check out the following Alcatel-Lucent white papers:

No 'One-Size-Fits-All' Path to Improving the Customer Experience

2012-04-23T14:18:07Z

By Erin Harrison

In this day in age, no matter what business you are in, the customer is king.

As we touched on last week (and commands further attention), European telecom operators are not cutting it when it comes to delivering a stellar – or even an adequate – customer experience. This weakened Quality of Experience (QoE) tendency is forcing tech-savvy consumers to side with the company that is most responsive to their communications needs and not necessarily the one that offers a specific kind of service.

Typically consumers base their requirements on the strength, speed and coverage of their network, the depth and breadth of their product and services portfolio and, least of all, price. But this is the case no longer.

A recent study conducted in EMEA by European Communications – the results of which appear in a recent special edition, “Customer Experience” – found overwhelmingly that telecom operators are losing their edge when it comes to QoE. Alarmingly, only17 percent of operators say they have a 360-degree view of their customers.

Most important, in a subsequent interview with Ben Geller, senior director of marketing at Alcatel-Lucent, he said the study reveals that the main differentiator between telecom operators these days is found not in the services offered but the customer experience overall.

“The real differentiator [between companies] has ultimately become the customer experience offered,” said Geller. “The days of customer acquisition are largely gone. Markets are pretty much saturated and essentially, the strategy has become one that is not based on grabbing market share, but rather, on retaining market share and getting more value out of the customers that you already have.”

That means even if even if network service is consistently reliable, a bad experience or interaction can have major impact, including lost revenue from the customers that switch to another operator, which lowers customer lifetime value (CLV) and the sets forth an inability to monetize service portfolios.

In fact, more than 70 percent of consumers are willing to spend 10 percent or more with businesses that exceed their expectations, but when customers are dissatisfied, their likelihood of churning increases by a factor of 10, according to statistics from Alcatel-Lucent.

In line with the findings and the need to take a more holistic view, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) offers Motive Customer Experience Management solutions that can help service providers make a good impression by getting it right the first time.

Using Motive CXM solutions, service providers can:

Improve the order to activation ratio
Reduce the number of calls that come through to the help desk
Reduce average handle time and increase first call resolutions for tech support inquires
Reduce the number of no-defect-found device returns

Those service providers with good QoE are able to reduce their support costs and ultimately improve their bottom line. However, it is imperative to keep in mind there is no one-size-fits-all solution or prescribed path to improve QoE, Geller noted.

“Every provider has their own unique set of problems they are trying to solve,” he said. “Some [operators] are going to want to start with better monetizing the assets that they have…others might want to be able to minimize the number of incoming calls for tech support, while others, still, will have no idea where they want to start.”

Telecom Operators Need to Improve Leadership, Customer Experience Management

2012-04-17T16:27:07Z

By Erin Harrison

We won’t sugarcoat it: European telecom operators are not reaching their full market potential due to a lack of leadership and customer visibility. In fact, just 12 percent of C-suite executives are leading the customer experience agenda at major operators, according to a new survey conducted by European Communications—the results of which appear in a recent special edition, “Customer Experience.”

Of concern, no one is leading a customer experience effort in 8 percent of operators. In a majority of cases, (41 percent) individual managers are taking it upon themselves, while for 39 percent of respondents, a dedicated customer experience manager has been put in charge.

While the findings cast a negative shadow on the customer experience focus by European service providers (SPs), the study’s results should be motivation for the SPs’ IT decision makers who want to turnaround their customer experience efforts and become more profitable.

A lack of coherent leadership naturally feeds down to a fragmented implementation of strategy. Although a majority of operators (45 percent) said customer experience is treated as an integral part of everything their organization does across all business units, that means a majority does not.

“A well-established customer experience strategy should be treated as an integral part of the entire organization,” said Michael Opitz, director at management consultancy Arthur D. Little who conducted the survey.

Two interesting graphics from the survey are of note: In the first one, respondents were asked if they had a 360-degree view of their customers. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the answer was that most did not or did not know.

In the second one, those surveyed were asked to define what attributes they felt should be included in a holistic view. As can be noted from the list, much of the information that would be necessary for a holistic approach to creating a better customer experience currently resides in databases that typically do not interact with each other. This highlights an area of opportunity where the effective use of “Big Data” could yield significant benefits. These include better internal insights into operations as well as identification of customer contact areas that need to be improved so that experiences are optimized.

As we all know, a significant part of transforming the customer experience is making a good first impression. In line with the findings and the need to take a more holistic view, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) offers Motive Customer Experience Management solutions that can help service providers make a good impression by getting it right the first time.

ALU’s solutions can help create successful network, device, application and service set-up and activation, and also helps fuel marketing campaigns. In addition, these services boost first call resolution and cut average handle time for technical support and service management inquires – such efficiencies help service providers stand out and succeed.

While operators are slightly more optimistic about the performance of their own company when compared to the telecoms industry as a whole, according to the EC survey, overwhelmingly operators said they regarded network congestion and other quality of service issues as the biggest source of poor customer experience.

Using Motive CXM solutions from Alcatel-Lucent, service providers can:

Improve the order to activation ratio
Reduce the number of calls that come through to the help desk
Reduce average handle time and increase first call resolutions for tech support inquires
Reduce the number of no-defect-found device returns

As consumers continue to gravitate toward more complex devices and services, which are connected to fixed line and mobile networks, the effort to deliver a consistent, quality customer experience is multiplying costs for communications service providers. Simplifying customer interactions helps service providers improve quality of experience (QoE) and build stronger, longer-lasting and more profitable customer relationships.

While the European Communications survey shed a bright light on the deficiencies of Europe’s SPs, the reality is that similar studies in the past few years by a number of respected firms have come to the same conclusion globally. In one of the interesting ironies of our times those who are foundational players in enabling others to use Big Data and analytics to gain competitive edge as woefully behind culturally and technologically themselves in do so. In fact, many of the studies have also concluded that telecom SP failure to leverage the insights they have into a transformation of the way in which their customers experience their products, people and processes is leaving a huge competitive opportunity for OTTs and other third parties to fill the breach.

This is a crucial operations area. It is a survey, indeed an entire issue of the publication, that commands attention.

A Holistic Approach is Necessary for Quality Customer Experiences

2012-04-09T17:45:37Z

By Mae Kowalke

For the hotly competitive world of mobile communications service providers, it’s no longer enough simply to provide fast, reliable connections for a variety of devices at competitive rates.

A recent article in the Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) e-zine Enriching Communications titled, “Taking Care of the Customer Experience,” co-authored by ALU’s Ben Geller, Senior Director of Marketing and Oliver Krahn, Customer Experience Transformation Growth Program Leader, on this subject is worth a read. They explain how, “Service providers are learning that they cannot differentiate with devices, services or pricing.” This is clearly a dramatic change from the past.

If the old practices are not the optimal path to success it leads to an interesting question, what really does differentiate a service provider anymore? As you probably have guessed from the title of this blog and the ALU article, the answer is providing an outstanding customer experience based on a holistic approach.

Geller and Krahn believe a large part of creating such experiences involved making things easy. This means easy in the customer’s eyes. They believe there are four main elements to viewing an experience through the eyes of a customer:

Services and devices are simple to start using right away
Network connectivity is always available when it’s needed
Devices and applications work the way they’re supposed to
Problems will be quickly identified and resolved

At the end of the day, service providers are both the creators of the customer experience as well as the enablers for others. This puts significant pressure on them to consistently provide a good quality of experience (QoE) regardless of the type of customer, or their location and to do so according to their expectations, needs and contractual relationships. What it means is the ability to manage these anywhere customers and to use analytics to gain insights into how to constantly improve the (QoE) and their value to the service provider as can be done with ALU's Motive Customer Experience Solutions portfolio. This includes careful attention to the speed and quality of response when problems occur which is a priority for retaining customer loyalty.

The good news is that providers have many assets that support an outstanding customer experience. It’s just a matter of appropriately leveraging those assets.

As Geller and Krahn note, “They own robust, secure and scalable networks that can support an array of services…They have access to innovative devices with open platforms that support application innovation. In short, they have all the components required to deliver a market-leading customer experience.” Indeed, these tools include such things as the ability to optimize bandwidth without sacrificing performance through such capabilities as mobile smartloading, and giving third-parties and internal developers the ability to use open APIs to create new revenue-generating applications and services

The last item about open APIs is crucial for success going forward, especially when combined with the insights gained from leveraging the information generated by customer services management tools. As the authors explain, creative partnerships are important and making sure everybody in the ecosystem is in a position to ensure the end customer has a compelling experience is key. “Service providers with robust infrastructures, networks, billing systems and help desks can essentially become service providers to application and content providers (ACPs),” Geller and Krahn point out. “Collaboration with ACPs can drive innovation in the application space, generate new revenue and influence the customer experience.”

They also explain that part of making things easy for customers means recognizing there is no one-size-fits-all approach or procedure for delivering an outstanding customer experience. New thinking, new strategies and new priorities, applied in customized ways, are critical. They emphasize that, “Every service provider plots its own path to transformation, often starting with a desire to address a specific pain point or opportunity…The right starting point and goals are essential.”

Some strategies service providers are using for managing the customer experience include:

Multi-channel customer care: to ensure the same quality of information and experience across all channels (phone, web, e-mail, IM, etc.).
Analytics: to measure how likely customers are to recommend service to others.
Maximizing network capacity yield: shifting usage patterns and rewarding customers for using the network during off-peak periods.

As with so many aspects of accommodating the dynamics of a changing world where the pace of everything is speeding up, and challenges can arise from almost anywhere at any time, Geller and Krahn present a powerful case as to why a holistic approach to the creation, substance and growth of quality customer experiences rest on service providers knocking down their operationally silos and embracing a holistic approach that is QoE-centric.

It is difficult to argue with their conclusion that, “To compete in the long term, executives must find ways to align departments and ensure that every person in the service provider organization is focused on delivering the best possible customer experience.” What this means is according to them is, “Extending consistency, universality and intuitiveness across every customer contact channel including call centers, web portals, IVRs and retail stores.”

Finally, it should be noted that this idea of a holistic approach must be viewed in the context of understanding that creating an end-user (the front end of the value-chain) quality customer experience can be considered the output of creating quality customer experiences for the back-end as well. Holism means making business processes and practices, and the people who use them more efficient and effective by empowering them with information from across the enterprise. This is not theory. It is best practice.

Demand for Connected Services Drives Need for Customer Experience Solutions

2012-04-02T13:06:40Z

By Erin Harrison

Demand for broadband services is growing at an explosive pace as consumers look for richer and more personalized connected customer experiences. But service providers’ fast and reliable networks can’t win over every customer. In addition, competition from new brands is making it tougher to differentiate with devices, services and pricing. In short, to stay competitive, service providers (SPs) have an imperative to cater to the needs of the market that goes beyond traditional approaches.

While consumers are aware that new technologies can bring added complexity, they also expect their devices and services to keep bringing them simpler and more compelling experiences. Based on these trends, SPs need new differentiators to remain competitive. To stand out and deliver market leading customer experiences, SPs need to make their offers easier to buy, easier to use with more user-friendly options for payment.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive portfolio of solutions offers a four-pronged approach for SPs to step up their games:

Motive CX Management is focused on getting new devices, applications and services up and running quickly, by simplifying their introduction on the network, managing upgrades and service modifications, and providing a consistent, low-hassle experience for customers.
Motive CX Analytics provides monitoring tools that track the performance of the devices, applications and services running on the network. These tools, which leverage unique algorithms developed by Bell Labs, provide key insights and dashboards that infer overall customer experience and allow for detailed customer experience insights.
Motive CX Optimization empowers SPs to provide customers with the best service experience possible while making better use of network capacity. Using historical data about customers, devices, applications and the network, SPs can examine trends, experiences and usage patterns – segmented by types of users – and take accurate and proactive actions with yield management and loyalty.
Motive CX Consulting consists of a dedicated team that – using a patent-pending methodology – identifies unique opportunities to improve the wide range of customer experience touch points within a service provider organization.

The portfolio, as seen below, is comprehensive in terms of dealing with all aspects of SP operations that need to be engaged to creating optimal customer experiences in regard to the granularity of the prongs.

Source: Alcatel-Lucent Motive

At the end of the day, SP ability to improve the customer experience is about engendering more immersive and enriching engagements. In fact, Alcatel-Lucent contends that with Motive Customer Experience Solutions SPs can increase profitability by:

Simplifying customer interactions
Improving business performance using customer insights
Enhancing loyalty and profitability
Improving the customer experience

With commoditization fast becoming the norm in many service markets, and alternatives only a click away, it is becoming increasingly clear that customer experience management may be the most important competitive differentiator in the future. SPs understand this and are aware that having the right tools in place to accurately measure and manage their relationships with customers will be critical to their success.

Together We Can Go Far: Alcatel-Lucent's ng Connect Program Drives Innovation for New Communications Technology Concepts

2012-03-19T17:40:39Z

By Mae Kowalke

Thanks to significant advances in broadband communication technology in the past few years, people from many industries and disciplines are coming up with some pretty innovative ways to work, play and do business. These often-disparate innovations represent growing opportunity for even greater changes, and greater rewards, if devices, applications and infrastructures were more effectively brought together.

With that vision in mind, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) founded the ng Connect Program, intended to create an end-to-end ecosystem for rapidly delivering next generation services and applications, by combining the resources of industry, business and academic leaders. Enterprises, consumers and service providers all stand to benefit.

The ng Connect Program rightly claims that, “The opportunity is unprecedented. “ It has eight main goals:

Bring together companies that would not otherwise be linked to drive innovation
Blur the lines between wireline and wireless broadband user experiences
Foster concepts for innovative applications and devices
Integrate and validate new service concepts
Deliver new services, revenue models and applications to enterprises and service providers
Enable deployment of simple, innovative applications and services for consumers
Improve time to market for new concepts
Address key issues around early adoption of LTE and other broadband technologies

Connectivity, ALU points out, is rapidly converging in ways transformative to business, daily life, entertainment, and other areas. Individual companies, however, do not have the resources or expertise to rapidly deploy innovative services, create profitable new business models, or remove barriers to mass adoption.

The ng Connect Program addresses five main areas that represent barriers to success: innovation, connectivity and distribution, digital media management and QoS, applications and service integration, and business models and cases.

Addressing these barriers to success requires driving top line revenues, increasing competitive advantages, lowering OPEX, reducing churn, leveraging assets across networks, creating new business models, accelerating time to market, and speeding up resolution of standards and regulatory issues.

The ng Connect Program is driving innovation through three main elements:

Innovative Ecosystem – community of pioneering organizations and individuals
Innovative Environment – physical and virtual innovation spaces and leading edge tools and techniques
Concept Development – help for service providers to agilely create, evaluate and validate service concepts

The programs summarized below exemplify how various technologies and services are being brought together in innovative ways through ng Connect.

Acquisition – interactive mobile game that allows users to check in at physical locations, own locations virtually and rent out space to friends for a small fee.
Avatrainer – a fitness experience build on Microsoft Kinect, using personal avatars for virtual group setting workouts.
Connected Classroom – application that allows students to locate classes on a campus map and locate friends in real-time, and educators to provide lesson plans and collaborate with other teachers.
Connected Service Vehicle – suite of cloud-based services for commercial vehicles using tablet-to-care linkages, speech recognition for secure login, high definition video surveillance, and other applications.
Connected Shopper - combines online and in-store shopping through tools like QR codes and 3D kiosks.
Fan Cam – allows spectators and fans in sports venues to live-stream the view from their seat to editors who can then select from the content to display on the big screen.
GameTime Media Table – network-connected table for retail and hospitality environments, giving customers a chance to try-before-they-buy.
Next Gen TV – interactive TV experience for video calling, e-health services, home power monitoring using RFID, and other tools.
Striker – public safety vehicle with built-in communications platform featuring push-to-talk radio, iPad integration, high definition video over LTE, and other capabilities.
TeleConsult – healthcare application that allows consumers to ‘visit’ healthcare professionals using video conferencing, Bluetooth, and text apps.
Virtual Concierge – LTE-connected digital platform for 2-way video interaction, easily deployable in airports, hotels and other locations.

Want to be part of helping create the future? Participation in the ng Connect program is a way to explore how working together with other innovators is the path to accelerate your progress on the road to success.

Cloud-Based Video Provides New Immersive Communications Capabilities

2012-03-13T16:38:29Z

By Erin Harrison

Today’s end user is looking for a richer conversation experience when using a variety of network-connected devices.

For example, new technologies are emerging that allow people to use any video-enabled device to enter a shared virtual space, and discuss and share information in a way that is almost like being together in the same physical space. As a result, these advances in video communications have provided a new opportunity for service providers to bring interactive video conversations to any device, from anywhere.

According to an article in Alcatel-Lucent’s Enriching Communications, Immersive Communications: A New Video Conversation Experience, with these new technologies users will no longer be limited to the confines of telepresence rooms to experience an immersive conversation at long distance. They will be able to experience this at work, at home and on the move – holding video meetings and sharing documents over PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Immersive communications includes both verbal and non-verbal communication such as gestures, body language, posture, facial expression and eye contact, which are necessary for remote participants to engage in honest, genuine and emotional conversations.

While videoconferencing has brought communications to another level, it hasn’t lived up to expectations since current video collaboration systems are often expensive, restrictive, complex and non-intuitive. The experience isn’t as rich or engaging as it is in related media, such as TV, movies and video games.

With immersive group video enterprises can adopt more flexible work models and distributed teams can engage in more creative and truly interactive video conversations, both scheduled and ad hoc.

Because immersive communications rely so heavily on the network, service providers are in the ideal position to take advantage of the new revenue opportunities it brings. SPs can leverage their networks, using the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architectural framework to deliver real-time immersive group video services with consistently high Quality of Service (QoS).

They can also offer immersive communications as a hosted cloud service. In fact, many are already moving to distributed cloud architectures that are ideal for hosted and virtualized video services.

Those service providers that get involved early in the game will set themselves apart from the competition, giving them the greatest opportunity to capture and develop a large and loyal customer base for the immersive communications experience.

Getting More Apps and Services to More People Faster --Creating the Competitive Edge

2012-03-02T16:43:34Z

By Susan J. Campbell

The demand for innovative applications continues to grow, putting increased pressure on mobile service providers (SPs) to deliver more apps and services to people faster than the competition. To create and sustain a competitive edge, service providers must invest in faster and more flexible service deployment. At the same time, clear focus must be placed on open innovation to accelerate service development to enable the agility needed to optimize key opportunities in retail and wholesale.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent Enriching Communications article, Accelerate Communication Service Development explored the importance of the competitive edge and how mobile service providers can focus on their strengths to achieve the level of agility, innovation and flexibility necessary to effectively compete. The fact that service providers deliver solutions that work across devices and the boundaries of different networks is a key strength that can be monetized in sustainable and profitable ways.

Many of today’s new mobility-centric applications do not allow the user to connect with another application. Both communicating parties must be using the same app or even the same device. This limits the opportunity for the user and the developer. That creates opportunity for SPs to insert themselves into the mix. They can position themselves as the focal point of an evolving ecosystem that offers customers new capabilities and experiences and themselves the ability to leverage new capabilities like IMS to change the conversation experience for all involved.

The fact is that mobile service providers already have critical functionality in their networks, for global roaming and interoperability. They also offer strong billing, provisioning and support relationships with customers. With proper collaboration with developers and other third parties this can translate into an ecosystem that can widen competitive gaps and create new opportunities to accelerate service development based on such tools as the Alcatel-Lucent Converged Telephony Server.

It isn’t enough to simply communicate, however. Service providers today need to get ahead of the other players by extending their strengths and forming new communications around such things as Web 2.0 capabilities, multimedia instant messaging, social networking and video interactions (streamed and real-time.) They literally need to open their networks to the new era where applications enablement is the fuel that generates customer interest, stickiness, loyalty and profits.

As mentioned, Alcatel-Lucent believes a true competitive edge can come from implementation of an IMS network that offers the service provider a standards-based platform that allows for the reinvention of communications across mobile, fixed and the Web. It won’t be enough, however, to simply offer video, voice and messaging services. Providers seeking that edge must constantly experiment and focus on innovation to keep a step ahead of the competition.

The bottom line is the bottom line. SPs that adopt an open innovation strategy grounded in application enablement will combine the value of its network intelligence with Web innovation. This level of service agility will enable them to quickly add new capabilities and platforms, as well as develop an application ecosystem that bridges the gap between voice, video and Web, and fixed and mobile. It is the way to accelerate the creation of a competitive edge.