There a few things more confounding to mobile service providers in hotly contested markets than missing out on opportunities to generate more revenues and profits from what have been lightly used services. This is particularly the case in the United States where unlike much of the world where prepaid services are the norm, it is estimated that roughly 19 percent of U.S. subscribers avail themselves of these services.
That said, and despite some cultural and addressable market challenges, U.S. mobile services providers can change the game in their favor as prepaid is already experiencing significant growth due to a variety of factors, and if done correctly is poised according to research firm Yankee Group is to grow over the next few years faster than the overall telecommunications.Source: Yankee Group North America Mobile Forecast, December 2012
As Barbara Sampson, Senior Market Manager, Policy & Charging (P&C) Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent highlighted in a recent TechZine posting, Make the most of prepaid mobile plan growth, based on extensive research by Alcatel-Lucent found that prepaid suffers from:
To help U.S. operators fulfill and hopefully exceed the forecasts, SurePay® is Alcatel-Lucent’s solution that ensures there is a prepaid charging system in place that is flexible, scalable, and exceeds service provider and their customers’ expectations.
This is part of a series of postings (see below) relating to what options SurePay provides that U.S. mobile service providers can employ to maximize the prepaid opportunities. However, as a introduction to the detail in those postings it is instructive to look at what SurePay is and does.
Prepaid market realities and the role of SurePay
What research has confirmed is that mobile subscribers want to build their own price plans based on their demographics and usage behavior. Subscribers want to control all elements within a “custom” package, such as fixed minute increments, SMS, and data volumes. They are also demanding control over what applications they subscribe to and how much they pay. Legacy charging infrastructures are limited. However, with SurePay, operators can create and deploy marketing, user, and operation interfaces that define and modify price plans and promotions. It effectively guides and supports operators as they create, provision, and update SurePay tariff data, including bundles, tariff plans, and discounts.
Additionally, SurePay lets operators:
With SurePay, mobile operators can simultaneously offer a variety of charging options for a wide range of content types. And, SurePay’s flexibility and scalability for prepaid payment support can also be effectively expanded to real-time postpaid customers.
SurePay allows unified management of prepaid and postpaid subscribers with one system that handles convergent rating and charging. This also includes hybrid systems, which are defined as a combination of both prepaid and postpaid services over a single device. For example, it can accommodate a single handset where business calls are on a postpaid plan and personal calls are on a prepaid plan.
By supporting multiple payment modes across a single converged charging and rating engine, there is no need for separate rate support infrastructures. This results in reduced operational, service delivery, integration, and maintenance costs. SurePay also configures new tariff plans only once for both prepaid and postpaid subscribers.
A big benefit here is that SurePay supports shared data plans for consumer and enterprise subscribers. This lets multiple devices share a pool of data allowances and stimulates mobile data usage, thereby expanding the operator’s target base beyond prepaid customers.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent
SurePay’s high reliability, flexibility, and scalability encourage innovation. Faster setup of new prepaid mobile business plans and models help meet changing customer requirements and new market trends/drivers. SurePay service bundles and packages can also help mobile operators control costs, ensure customer stickiness, and generate additional revenues.
An example of this is SurePay’s Tariff Admin Tool. This service bundle provides marketing and operations interfaces to define and modify price plans and promotions, as well as test and verify a tariff plan offline prior to market rollout. It also provides the user interface to easily define and modify price plans and promotions. And it guides and supports mobile operators in the quick creation and provisioning of SurePay tariff data, including bundles, tariff plans, and discounts.
Finally, as with all prepaid plans, the customer knows how much they are paying and how close they are to reaching their limits. For those trying to watch carefully the amount of discretionary income they can allocate to mobile services, which for most households have become the real-time platform of choice for interacting, this is a real differentiated value, particularly for parental controls in limiting the use of children.
In short, prepaid is not just become an option, but its attraction can be enhanced if service providers have a platform that gives the customer several options that fit their unique requirements. After all, one size does not fit all, and customer choice translates into customer satisfaction and loyalty.
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The Internet and the smartphone have altered customer expectations related to service. They have both elevated the requirement for fast results in terms of response times, and they have made consumers more comfortable with finding answers themselves using the devices in their hands and the information that is now at their fingertips.
Meanwhile, communications providers continue to expand the ever-growing number of services they offer to consumers. That now includes an array of Internet access, mobile, and TV services. The growing number of CSP services and customers also increases the potential for more help desk inquiries.
Six to 53 percent of consumers across Brazil, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. reported they had issues with their high-speed Internet, mobile, or TV services within the last six months, according to recent research done by Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive unit. This illustrates the potential for CSP help desk overload, given the four countries have nearly 500 million mobile subscribers, more than 164 million Internet subscribers, and nearly 200 million TV subscribers. That means if just 10 percent of these users have service issues in any given six-month period, CSPs in these countries could have to work to help 14 million dissatisfied consumers each month, according to the Motive research paper “Toward self-service: Empowering connected consumers to help themselves”.
While the help desk is the primary channel for helping customers with their problems, mobile apps can also help do the job, reducing costs, lowering the strain on help desks and improving customer experiences through the channel in the process, and responding to the trend toward customer self-service. Indeed, as the Motive white paper explains, CSP self-service applications in some cases have reduced help desk calls by up to 75 percent and lowered the frequency of expensive truck rolls by more than a fourth.
However, the white paper goes on to note that self-service app adoption can be a challenge. Indeed, it says, typical adoption of such apps is 30 percent or less. It is why CSPs need to redefine the customer experience leveraging self-help.
A recent blog, 10 strategies for communications service providers looking to offer appealing self-service apps, by Greg Owens, Senior Director, Customer Experience Solutions Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent, however, offers tips on how CSPs can successfully introduce and drive adoption for customer self-service apps.
His suggestions include:
Self-help if not done properly can be as if not more frustrating than dealing with an agent who either is not skilled, or is not empowered to solve your problem or answer your question. However, done correctly it not only reduces expense by significantly cutting contact center call volumes, but also can be a valuable tool in actually improving the customer experience.
]]>The customer experience has always mattered, but its importance has grown in recent years. This has been driven by increased global competition, including the almost instant availability of alternations, and the rising expectations by fickle and informed consumer. Yet, cable operators have a long way to travel if they want to deliver the customer experience (CX) that consumers demand.
The Temkin Group’s Q3 2014 survey of 10,000 US consumers’ opinions about goods and services registered the lowest ranking average Net Promoter Score (NPS) for pay TV providers, a telling statistic. Internet service providers did almost as poorly, coming in only one position higher.
“As technology innovations drive shifts in consumer behavior and open new service opportunities, operators must start eliminating pain points,” stressed Alcatel-Lucent’s Nicholas Cadwgan in a recent TechZine article, Cable MSOs transform the customer experience. “This includes any obstacles that will impede their ability to launch and provide adequate care and quality assurance for those services.”
Cadwgan lays out four customer experience management (CEM) areas that cable operators should focus on.
“This means operators must have comprehensive control of and visibility into every device and every service delivered to those devices from their networks,” he noted.
2. Basic customer service has to be improved, including help desks, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and self-help portals.
“To provide CSRs all the information they need to reduce resolution time, the new CEM platform must have powerful analytics capabilities in conjunction with data-gathering that reaches across all devices and systems,” suggested Cadwgan.
Analytics systems need to be able to track and identify issues based on information relevant to whatever access link a particular user is on, and the operator’s CX system must be able to aggregate and present all relevant information from a user-centric viewpoint.
The customer experience matters, and cable operators better start taking it seriously if CX statistics are to be believed.
For more of Cadwgan’s thought about opportunities transformation can afford cable operators you are invited to listen to the following podcast on the subject.
So what has changed in twelve months? Here are some highlights, for me, of some great presentations and scintillating conversations that took place over the course of three days in the shadow of Westminster.
For starters, I heard quite a few references to Customer Effort Score (CES); nearly as many as I did of net promoter score (NPS), at the 2014 edition of this event. First published by the Harvard Business Review (HBR) in 2010, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” was a ground-breaking article that claimed you can best win customer loyalty by solving a customer's problem. Plain and simple.
This leads perfectly into the second topic that I heard discussed quite often: self-service or self-care. Various CSPs -- including Comcast, AT&T and O2 (Telefonica UK) -- showed examples of applications that can be used to order new services, change billing information and troubleshoot issues remotely. This aligns perfectly to the notion of the Customer Effort Score because the original HBR article introduced a number of key ideas, including one very important one: making it easy.
CSPs highlighted the benefits of self-care to their organizations, ranging from removing pressure from call centres and saving money, to motivating satisfied customers to make additional purchases.
Proactive action and/or communications was also cited by a number of CSPs as growing in importance. Whether it’s notifying customers on the status of infrastructure projects, network upgrades or outages, being more transparent was an approach that seems to be gathering momentum.
One CSP talked about the importance of correlating customer calls with known network problems, then providing updates on how repairs were coming along. They created a web page where people could register an issue -- even if it wasn’t worth calling about – that resulted in a heat map for all customers to see. In the case of a recent infrastructure upgrade, customer could see exactly what was being done, when/where it was being done and how long it would take.
Another CSP talked about the importance of monitoring network quality and fixing issues proactively, before most customers even notice that there is a problem. According to this speaker, 43% of their customer complaints are related to the quality of the service being delivered, with 17% of complaints being caused by the help desk, 10% by payment issues and the remaining 30% from five undisclosed areas combined.
By closely monitoring their networks, collecting analytics and sharing it with various departments (e.g., marketing, network planning, etc.), they can resolve issues that might affect thousands of people and/or reach out to customers proactively, when issues are known but cannot be fixed immediately.
The bottom line: consumers don’t care about how complex it is to deliver communications services in the 21st century. Instead, they want their service provider to proactively solve issues before they cause disruptions, provide them with the information and tools needed to be self-sufficient and, if they do call the Help Desk as a last resort, they expect the person at the other end of the line to be able to solve their issue quickly, efficiently and right the first time. Now, if only it was easy as it sounds.
Luckily, Motive CX solutions are designed to help our CSP customers provide better services to their customers; the modern consumer. We can make sure that you get that information to the right people at the right time. And the end result is great customer service.
]]>Self-service to one degree or another has been present since the rise of the web. However, customers are increasingly choosing self-service because they feel more empowered and it is often perceived to be an easier interaction than dealing with a live person. The rise of the smartphone also has increased the use of self-service.
In fact, as explained by Jessica Verbruggen, Integrated Marketing Assistant at Alcatel-Lucent Motive, in a recent TechZine article, Empowering Autonomous Customer Self-Care, self-service can be a win-win for customers and communications service providers (CSPs).
The voice of the customer supports self-service
Verbruggen, citing a recent consumer survey by Nuance Enterprise to illustrate here point. The survey found:
Plus, in terms of what motivates them to use a mobile app:
Benefits to CSPs
As noted, CSPs are finding self-service to be very beneficial. Experience has already proven that customer self-care reduces the cost of interaction with customers, allows them to collect more customer information and helps them deliver a more personalized experience.
“This, in turn, drives higher customer retention, increases revenues, and positions their brand as being a provider of a comprehensive and personalized customer experience,” Verbruggen noted.
One problem that many CSPs have, however, is easily delivering all the functionality that consumers expect and appreciate. That’s why products such as Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive’s Self-Service Console, part of the company’s Motive customer experience solution, are so well-received.
The Motive Self-Service Console empowers customers to pay their bills, access their accounts and schedule maintenance without having to involve a live agent. A large European operator that uses the tool has reported that 88 percent of customers that used the Motive troubleshooting application were able to avoid a call to the help desk entirely.
That’s huge. And it demonstrates strongly why CSPs are increasingly attracted to customer self-care.
“CSPs are able to cut costs, get a better view of their customers, and provide more personalized service,” explained Verbruggen. “That’s a win-win if I’ve ever seen one.”
]]>No matter where one looks these days, be it in enterprises or service providers, there can be no disputing that enhancing the customer experience has become a top, if not along with security the top, C-level concern.
Indeed, from burnishing the brand to enhancing customer loyalty, having permission to upsell and getting early visibility on new opportunities the customer experience (CX is now the short appellation) has become a cross line-of-business preoccupation and priority. This has meant business units’ increased attention on listening to, analyzing and reacting upon needs arising from the “voice of the customer” (or certainly knowing more about their service usage behavior), and IT department focus on providing the tools necessary to support these requirements.
It has also meant that businesses of all sizes and vertical markets are changing their views on what it takes to have a better understanding of the customers. This means using new metrics for success. It also has highlighted the realization that you need to look at life cycle management of customers, i.e., as the headline says it is no longer about the destination in the form of a sale but is about assuring optimization of what has been popularized as “The Customer Journey.”
Ultimately, what it has also meant is that organizations need not only the tools, skills and strategies to optimize the customer journey but also need to be able do so quickly. The reasons are obvious but worth repeating. Competitors are becoming more nimble and customers armed with better real-time information themselves have become more fickle. Time is of the essence.
Illustrative of an area where there is, or certainly should be, a sense of urgency regarding having all of the capabilities to optimize the customer journey is in the global mobile services business. This is a sector rife with competition and susceptible to high churn rates. The good news is that the information that resides in the network and various lines-of-business (LOBs), when properly mined, analyzed and acted upon can give service providers more satisfied customers and a competitive edge.
The question is, where are the places to go to get the information and tools needed? The answer can be seen in a recent Alcatel-Lucent webinar, “LTE, It’s Not About the Destination, but the Journey,” which is embedded in its entirety below.
Spoiler Alert!
I’d like to encourage you to view the entire webinar by sharing just a few insights provided by presenters David J. Swift Marketing Director Wireless, and Josee Loudiadis, Director Network Intelligence, Alcatel-Lucent.
The first is the chart that is the backdrop of the webinar (yes you are seeing double) which is a still frame tickler as to why Alcatel-Lucent believes the deployment of an LTE overlay network is the preferred way to go as the vehicle for being fast-to-market. Swift provides a granular explanation but the benefits slide sums it up well.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent webinar, LTE, It’s Not About the Destination, but the Journey
The savings are demonstrable and it should come as no surprise that several of the world’s leading mobile service providers have opted for an LTE overlay as their choice for not just deploying but leveraging the Alcatel-Lucent LTE Express to enable fast deployment.
For her section of the presentation Loudiadis highlights the Alcatel-Lucent belief that the network has the information to keep customers happy. She describes what this information is, and how it can be generated and analyzed for use in looking at:
In fact, a compelling case is made, and again with an emphasis on the need for service providers having some sense of competitive urgency, for implementing an analytics-driven customer care solution such as Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions.
While a bit of an eye chart, you hopefully get the picture.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent webinar, LTE, It’s Not About the Destination, but the Journey
Yes, the realities of the mobile market, especially as global service providers are in a mad dash to deploy LTE quickly and not fall behind competitors is to get it out there fast. However, being fast-to-market is only part of the equation. You need to also be cost-efficient, and more importantly fast in the market/agile as well. To be the later requires real-time actionable insights. That is where the information and insights from the network become critical.
Success going forward really will be about creating and leveraging better and better knowledge about the entire customer journey. Indeed, it is with such knowledge that services providers can go from being not just reactive but proactive in terms of not just pleasing customers but beating competitors to the punch.
]]>Churn can be a costly problem for service providers, particularly when it gets up into the high double-digit percentages. And that’s exactly what can happen when customers are less than satisfied with their communications services. In fact, it has been estimated that churn is 89 percent for subscribers who have a poor customer experience.
But there is an answer.
As highlighted in a recent TechZine article by Alan Marks, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions, Alcatel-Lucent, service providers can leverage analytics solutions to help them identify and track network resources, and customer behavior and experience on the network. This enables them to have visibility into whether customers are receiving the level of service for which they have subscribed.
As Marks explains, having such visibility helps service providers build customer loyalty. This has direct impact obviously on obtaining a reasonable return on investment (ROI) on those customers over time.
Plus, it better positions the service provider to upsell those subscribers in the future. It allows service providers to avoid customer care and new customer acquisition costs. And, of course, it results in happier customers, which is a positive all around.
The connected home is one application for which customer experience management tools that do analytics makes perfect sense. This arena is a relatively new one for service providers like the cable TV companies and telephone companies, which traditionally have liked to keep outside demarcation points at residential customer premises. But the connected home is now increasingly inviting service providers into consumer homes. This is great because it can enable those service providers to play a bigger role in the customer experience. It also creates challenges, however, because there are more moving parts that service providers need to consider when assessing the total customer experience.
New tools from such as Alcatel-Lucent Motive Customer Experience Solutions give service providers visibility into what’s happening with home device connectivity, Internet security and malware protection, online video quality of experience, and usage and performance. This information can be analyzed so service providers can make changes to their networks to improve the customer experience and to improve internal customer care processes.
As Marks details, the Motive CX analytics framework for optimizing the customer experience in the connected home is 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, content delivery networks (CDNs) and quality of experience (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.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent, TechZine blog, Analytics can customize the connected home
As depicted above, Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions portfolio includes solutions and consulting services that address different, critical touch points in the relationship between communications service providers and their customers. Among the offerings in the portfolio are Motive ServiceView (available in both Home and Mobile versions), which enables the visibility discussed earlier; Motive Big Network Analytics, which service providers can leverage to capture and extract intelligence from the network and combine it with key customer data; and many other solutions.
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While the Internet and all of the technologies that have stemmed from its creation have served to make our lives easier in many ways, they can also be very confusing and frustrating at times. In these times, people have traditionally turned to call centers to get customer support. In today’s increasingly digitized world though, fewer people are relying on this form of assisted service. Contacting a call center tends to be time consuming and, often times, frustrating. Traditional customer support is not very well-suited to handling the millions of very specific questions that arise during device usage every day. Enter mobile self-service.
There are few areas of our economy today that haven't been touched by the growing self-service industry. Many, it seems, prefer to resolve their issues themselves. People relish the ability to “do it themselves” because it affords them a certain level of control over their devices and services that was previously not attainable.
A recent consumer survey commissioned by Nuance Enterprise found that a majority of respondents thought positively about self-service. More specifically, 72% of smartphone users surveyed said that they have a more positive view of a company if they have a mobile self-care app, and 81% will tell others about a positive app experience. In terms of what motivates them to use a mobile app, 35% said that effortless transition to a live agent from a mobile app is the feature most likely to drive usage, while 48% want more functionality.
It’s not just customers who are embracing self-service though. Many CSPs are hopping on the bandwagon and offering web-based portals and mobile applications that standardize the customer experience across fixed and mobile device platforms. These tools provide customers with a personalized, contextual experience for diagnosing and troubleshooting configuration and performance issues related to access networks, home LANs, devices, applications, and Wi-Fi.
Why are both customers and service providers adopting self-care so enthusiastically? From the customer’s perspective, self-service is valuable because it is convenient and flexible. It provides an “autonomous communications channel enabling customers to obtain ongoing support on an “anytime” basis”[1]. Users are able to address the issue from wherever they are using whatever channel is most convenient for them, whether it be a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, the Internet, or within a website. This is being enabled by new technologies like WebRTC and VoLTE, which make it easy to strike up a conversation from anywhere. For CSPs, self-service not only reduces the cost of interaction with customers, but also allows them to collect more customer information to deliver a more personalized experience. This, in turn, drives higher customer retention, increases revenues, and positions their brand as being a provider of a comprehensive and personalized customer experience.
It is critical to implement these self-care initiatives without compromising customer satisfaction in return for the cost-savings associated with an automated self-service system. The self-service tools that are provided must be valuable to consumers in order for them to adopt them wholeheartedly. They must empower customers to transact how they want, when they want.
At Motive, self-service is something we have long been interested in. Our dynamic and innovative self-care products, like Motive’s Self-Service Console, empower CSPs to reduce support costs, accelerate problem resolution and exceed customer expectations. These tools also allow customers to pay their bills, access their accounts and schedule maintenance, all without having to involve an intermediary. After making Motive’s self care options available to a large European operator, 88% of customers that used its PC-based troubleshooting application were able to avoid a call to the help desk altogether.
Due to the increasing amount of human-computer interaction in our world today, many people are much more comfortable accessing an account via a self-service portal. Customers feel empowered when they are able to avoid bypass the middleman and just resolve their problems themselves. On the flip side, CSPs are able to cut costs, get a better view of their customers, and provide more personalized service. That’s a win-win if I’ve ever seen one.
[1] Gupta, B., Johnson, R., & Pramidi, S. (2005). The Challenge of Customer Self-Service in Telecom. Infosys.
Field service is often the only face of the company that a customer will ever see, so it’s not a surprise that CSPs are striving to make a positive impact on customers in this realm. Achieving full potential in field service saves CSPs a lot of time and money. Productivity and efficiency reviews targeted at field service operations, done correctly, can reinforce other areas of the business by increasing customer satisfaction and improving safety and quality.
Field service has traditionally worked as follows. Something breaks or needs to be installed. The customer notifies the CSP. Dispatch schedules a field service technician. The technician arrives, resolves the issue, then moves on to the next job. While many CSPs have perfected the process of efficiently scheduling technicians, it does not negate the fact that there has been a disruption in a consumer’s life or an organization’s productivity, and they are likely unhappy as a result.
The CSP is starting from a disadvantaged position and must turn the situation around by providing exceptional field service – or risk losing customers, profits, and opportunities. Inefficient field service increases the amount of time the customer is stuck with a non-performing asset, thereby increasing the amount of time that the customer is not generating revenue from that asset, as well as increasing the amount of time that the customer must spend appeasing his/her own customers. All of this eventually leads to lower renewal rates and, ultimately, CSP customer loss.
So, what does it take to achieve field service excellence? For Alcatel-Lucent, an optimized field service solution empowers lower-cost service methods. This includes remote service, self-service, and fixes by phone or mail from the contact center. An optimized approach incorporates several essential elements, including: automation, mobility, and consolidation and collaboration.
Automation:
Communications service providers need the ability to automate and remotely manage broadband access network operations at three key stages of the customer lifecycle:
This approach will enable CSPs to accelerate time-to-market, reduce operating expenses, and maximize their capital investments. The ultimate prize, of course, is long-term customer loyalty.
Mobility:
“Best-in-Class organizations prioritize the investment in mobile tools to provide technicians with better access to information in the field. The need to resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently has led to the best firms equipping the field with the right tools to find information in a complex world.”[1]
CSPs must decide which corporate systems should be available via mobile device at a customer site in order to most effectively resolve potential issues. On the scheduling/dispatch side, CSPs need to have the GPS aspect of their mobile strategy figured out up front so they can make location-specific scheduling and routing decisions from Day 1 of go-live.
Consolidation and Collaboration:
Maintaining separate dispatch systems or processes for different areas of business is expensive and inefficient. With a single common service management platform, CSPs can comprehensively define, publish and execute advanced service activation, troubleshooting and management logic across the service delivery ecosystem.
If you’re still on the fence about leveraging field service as a revenue growth driver, consider this:
Alcatel-Lucent’s solutions allow customers to receive a convenient, more personal experience while also allowing executives more visibility into the organization. With our solutions, field agents are more empowered to deliver great service while completing more jobs per day.
Above all, Alcatel-Lucent’s field service management solutions get the right field service technician to the right place at the right time – with the right service parts, tools, and information – to get the job done right.
[1] Aberdeen Group. Service Lifecycle Excellence: Resolution at the Heart of Service. July 2014.
http://www.aberdeen.com/research/9358/rr-service-lifecycle-excellence/content.aspx
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Data and signaling growth are usually good news for network operators, since growth often translates into higher revenues. But when growth is averaged over a month or quarter, the daily highs and lows of network activity are smoothed out. And signaling spikes remain hidden within the averages. These spikes can overwhelm available signaling capacity, which impairs the customer experience, as well as the operator’s reputation.
What happens when a spike occurs? Typically, a CPU Overload alarm appears on various mobile nodes. And the Network Operations Center (NOC) immediately starts praying that the burst is short-lived and doesn’t go over maximum peak-rate capacity. Because when that happens, all consumers are denied service access. Then, the process of identifying the source of the problem begins. This can be arduous, because it often involves applications completely out of NOC control. And the issue can’t be resolved easily without solid network analytics that enables engagement with application and device developers.
That’s the reason signaling information is a crucial part of the Alcatel-Lucent Mobile Apps Rankings report and why LTE World 2014 devotes an entire pre-conference day to the topic. It’s also why this blog offers a closer look at how some real-world disruptive signaling spikes got started — and were finally resolved.
Signaling spikes: The basics
There are three kinds of signaling spikes:
The following signaling spikes were observed with the Alcatel-Lucent Wireless Network Guardian (WNG) on multi-vendor networks. These examples demonstrate the impact and resolution of signaling jumps ranging from 36% to 92%.
Microbursts 1: Samsung, Google and a pre-loaded app
As shown in Figure 1, all the serving gateways (SGW) in this example experienced short signaling spikes, six times per day (at 00:00, 1:30 a.m., 6:30 a.m., 8:00 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.). The spikes started with a barely noticeable 8% jump in signaling and grew steadily to the 44% jump that’s clearly visible one year later.At last, one spike became too much for the SGW. Some of its blades were brought down by the overload, which caused a signaling disruption and partial service outage. Traffic was diverted to a higher-capacity backup SGW, until the issue could be isolated and resolved.
Using the Alcatel-Lucent WNG for analysis, the problem was isolated to Samsung S4 devices with Android versions 4.2 and 4.3 — when traffic originated from these devices and tried to reach Google.com. Once Samsung had that information, they were able to determine that a pre-loaded app on that device generated the spikes. This app connected with a Google API to determine the user’s location, so local news could be delivered to the consumer.
In Android version 4.4, the app had already been removed. For versions 4.2 and 4.3, the operator initially believed they could simply remove the offending app as a way to address the signaling spikes. However, pre-loaded apps are difficult to remove. So instead, multiple updates have been pushed to test devices, in attempts to iteratively eliminate the problem.
Extended bursts: Viber outage
One day in April, CPU overload alarms reported that Radio Network Controllers (RNCs) were flooded with requests. The signaling spike pattern shown in Figure 3 was matched to one app: Viber. Further investigation into Viber’s flows showed that Viber servers were no longer responding. But here’s what wasn’t clear: Why would this app outage generate such a load on signaling resources? The answer lies in how Viber handled the call failures. The app loaded on mobile devices tried repeatedly to connect with the Viber server, and that created a growing wave of signaling as more and more users kept trying to connect.
The impact of this outage varied across networks. Where only a few consumers used the Viber app, operators might not have noticed. Where there was a high proportion of Viber users, they experienced a spike. Each network’s ability to tolerate the spike depended on whether it had enough peak hour signaling capacity. The timing of the Viber outage also produced different results in different geographical locations. That is, an outage during the network’s peak time — and the heaviest Viber usage — had a heavier impact.
Microbursts 2: Microsoft Exchange and iOS
This case illustrates another short-term outage where a signaling spike exceeded signaling capacity on a daily basis. As shown in Figure 4, a 36% signaling jump occurred every day at midnight, but the reason for the spike remained mysterious. The Alcatel-Lucent WNG narrowed down the issue: The signaling was initiated when devices tried to reach the Microsoft Exchange server. Lasting less than 1 second, this exchange only involved iPhone devices, and it occurred most often with iOS version 6.1. After obtaining this information, network operators were able to contact Apple and identify the root cause. Then a fix was implemented in a later iOS version update.
These real-world examples of signaling spikes clearly demonstrate that signaling design is an important aspect of the customer experience. More specifically, they bring home three important points: First, a robust and well-dimensioned signaling plane that can absorb sudden spikes is essential. In addition, our device and app ecosystem needs to consider how network signaling interactions can be optimized, when designing products. And finally, a strong network analytics solution is also a necessity for tracking the signaling of each application, detecting signaling anomalies and identifying root causes as quickly as possible.
The Alcatel-Lucent Analytics Beat studies examine a representative cross-section of mobile data customers using the Alcatel-Lucent Wireless Network Guardian, and they are made possible by the voluntary participation of our customers. Collectively, these customers provide mobile service to millions of subscribers worldwide.
Follow Josee on Twitter @joseeloudiadis
The last Six Degrees blog explored consumer attitudes toward two different mobile share plan options: sharing data only and sharing voice, messaging and data. This blog will explore attitudes toward a 3rd option: sharing unlimited voice and messaging — but not data — across multiple devices or subscribers.
Of course, data is still in the mix. Subscribers who use a shared voice and messaging plan would have the option to purchase a separate data plan for their own devices. This sharing scenario is similar to the one offered by the Sprint FramilyTM plan, where each plan member has the option to choose a different monthly data limit.
Fast-growing Framily Sprint’s report for the quarter ending March 31, 2014 charts the rapid growth of the company’s Framily shared plan offer. Although the offer was introduced early in the quarter and only available in Sprint-branded stores, nearly 3 million customers had already signed up, making Framily the fastest-growing Sprint rate plan ever. An interesting dynamic of the Framily program is its ability to turn customers into recruiters for Sprint as they try to maximize their discount by getting more people to join their Framily. |
Market research by Alcatel-Lucent reveals that consumer interest in unlimited shared voice and messaging plans varies significantly from country to country (Figure 1). These plans appeal to a small percentage of respondents in the United Kingdom, United States and France. But interest is much higher in Brazil and Japan: Nearly one-fifth of Brazilian respondents and more a third of Japanese respondents say they are interested in unlimited shared voice and messaging plans. Interestingly, those who indicate a preference for sharing unlimited voice and messaging – including those from Brazil and Japan – aren’t demographically different from those who prefer to share data only or share everything.
The Alcatel-Lucent survey also shows that those interested in unlimited shared voice and text plans are likely to purchase these plans. Among interested respondents, likelihood to purchase ranges from 64% (Japan) to 92% (Brazil). While overall interest in sharing voice and text is lower in France, the UK and the US, those who are interested are highly inclined to make the purchase, as shown in Figure 2. These findings carry on a theme that emerged in the previous blog in the Six Degrees series: consumers attracted by sharing plans are willing to take action to get what they want.
As with data and "everything” share plans, the availability of unlimited voice and messaging share plans has a formidable impact on customer churn and retention for interested consumers. Respondents in all 5 countries show a willingness to switch service providers to get their preferred form of mobile sharing or to stay with their current service provider to keep it.
Figure 3 shows the churn impact of unlimited voice and messaging share plans among those who express an interest in these plans. Willingness to switch is strong in all 5 of the surveyed countries. It is highest in Brazil (86%) and the US (78%), and lowest in France (39%).
Figure 4 shows the retention impact of unlimited shared voice and messaging plans in the 5 countries. In each case, more than half of all interested respondents indicate that these plans would have a strong or very strong influence on their willingness to stay with their current service provider. Shared voice and messaging plans exert the strongest pull in the US (91%), UK (90%) and Brazil (87%). The retention impact isn’t quite as strong in France (55%).
The survey results show two key ways in which service providers can benefit from offering shared unlimited voice and messaging plans. The first is that they can attract new subscribers from a defined segment of the market. The second is that they can create “stickiness” by giving existing customers the ability to attach multiple devices and subscribers to a single mobile plan.
The primary reason respondents give in favor of sharing only voice and messaging is that they anticipate a lower price. This response is especially common in Japan (87%) but was chosen by more than 70% of respondents in all countries. Saving time by managing a single bill is a secondary motivator in France, the UK and the US.
But why not share data as well? Consumers adding data to the mix could surely expect a lower price and a single, unified bill.
Conversations between Alcatel-Lucent and service providers have uncovered a few reasons why subscribers may not want data included in a share plan. For example, some account owners won’t want to take responsibility for ensuring that individual plan members don’t use too much data. Likewise, some plan members may not like the idea of ceding account control and having their data limits or
In markets with low-price mobile data, there is still interest in individual plans that allow subscribers to share data from a primary account with one or several of their own data devices. See the previous blog in the series for more on data-only sharing. |
usage managed by another subscriber.
Because of this, some of Alcatel-Lucent’s service provider customers indicate that they see data usage control as a source of increased tension among share plan members – often family members. Not sharing data relieves this tension even if voice and messaging are shared. In markets where competition has spurred service providers to offer low-price data plans, the barrier to enabling data use for multiple devices and subscribers is low, and data sharing offers limited value. However, sharing voice and messaging still has appeal for the discounts that are assumed to come with it.
The Alcatel-Lucent survey results make it clear that mobile subscribers who are interested in sharing –whether it’s voice and messaging, data or all of the above —know what they want and are willing to take action to get it. All of these sharing options are possible in a data-first business model. By flipping their business models and putting data first, service providers can give subscribers the sharing options they want. This freedom of choice will help increase customer satisfaction and retention and reduce churn.
Connect with the author on Twitter: @rhcrowe
Past blogs in this series:
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I’ve received a lot of questions from mobile operators, who are asking about mobile data growth and how it’s related to the youth market — meaning consumers from the age of 18 to 25 or sometimes 18 to 22. The mobile operators’ own research shows that the youth segment is valuable — and influences adult segments. The Business Case for Youth section of the Mobile Youth Report also says: “The youth market is worth $1 trillion dollars. Youth drive high-end smartphone markets. Youth have the highest lifetime value of all customers.” As a result, mobile operators around the world are taking notice of young consumers, and some are investing in a new youth brand to attract that segment.
For example, in Ireland, “48” is the new wave of youth mobile services targeting the 48-month duration between the ages of 18 and 22. See how 48 cleverly branded its video campaigns. It’s not about subscriptions, but about low-cost membership in the 48 community. Its members can get calling, texting, and mobile Internet services with a manageable cost — and find online support through FAQs, community support, and a 48 customer care agent offering online help with a 24-hour response time. On top of all that, 48 is encouraging members to grow their community by giving “Kickback” to members and their friends who join.
On the other hand, the Mobile Youth Report also points out under Youth Branding: “You don’t have to be a Youth Brand. Most popular brands with youth are Youthful not Youth brands (e.g. Starbucks, Apple, Facebook). Youthful means open to ideas and dialogue. The Next Big Thing always starts in the youth market and spreads to the mass market/adults later e.g. SMS, mobile messaging, Facebook, Instagram.”
Clearly, the recent “un-carrier” events launched at T-Mobile USA are working to attract youth through the CEO’s twitter account and the company’s Facebook and Instagram campaigns on “Break-up Letter” and “Rebel Maker.” These communications are getting a lot of notice by the youth segment.
Whether creating a youth brand or a youthful brand, mobile operators need to consider how to craft offers that promote the “mobile data first” experience. Young people don’t usually have a lot of money, but they are highly motivated to use data on the go, especially in countries where public Wi-Fi is readily available. The goal for 3G/4G LTE mobile operators is to drive the “mobile data first” experience into young consumers’ behaviors, so they will stop being afraid to use mobile data and feel in control of what they use and when they use it.
What other successful examples of youth brands vs. youthful brands do you know about? Do you agree that the youth segment influences adult segments in mobile data growth? Why or why not?
If you like this article, please feel free to share it with your followers. Next week, I will offer my insights on the 10 ways to drive mobile data growth through the youth market.
]]>The move to LTE networks, increasing data usage, and the proliferation of multiple devices per user has ushered in the concept of shared data plans.
Shared data plans offer benefits both to consumers and operators. For carriers, shared data plans mean the ability to have a single pool of data minutes that they can use across their multiple devices. For carriers, shared data plans mean increased customer loyalty and additional revenue opportunities.
However, shared data plans also mean challenges for carrier charging systems.
“One key goal of the system is to track how much of the data quota is still available for use,” noted a recent TechZine posting, Tracking Data Usage in a Multi-Device World, by Pramod Koppol, CTO of the Payment, Policy & Charging business at Alcatel-Lucent. “With shared data plans, the factors involved in tracking the balance can be quite complex.”
Source: Alcatel-Lucent
That’s because smart devices offer always-on data sessions, multiple simultaneous sessions can occur on a single device, and data usage patterns can be highly diverse across users depending on the types of applications and services each prefers.
This challenge can lead to two negative possible outcomes that definitely will not drive customer loyalty.
First, it hinders carrier’s ability to deliver timely and accurate alerts such as notifying subscribers when they have reached a particular threshold in their data usage. Second, a session request could be rejected because the charging system is not aware that data is still available for use.
“Both these issues are most likely to occur when many data sessions are active simultaneously,” noted Koppol.
The way that shared data plans work from a charging perspective is that each session request is allocated a data slice from the overall plan quota. When this slice is used, another slice is issued. When the session ends, what’s left of the slice is added back to the quota. But while a session is using a slice, there is no way for the charging system to know how much of that slice will be used.
Using smaller data slices is one obvious solution, but this adds tremendous extra signaling load. More sophisticated measures are needed.
“In general, a variety of approaches can be used to determine the per session slice size for multiple simultaneous data sessions,” Koppol explained. “For example, slices can be assigned as a portion of the full monthly quota, getting smaller as the month proceeds, but with a minimum and maximum applied. The size can be set according to static attributes, such as device type, access type or Cost of Service (COS) category. Or it can be determined with dynamic attributes, such as location and usage. A combination of these factors can also be used.”
Whatever method is employed, however, it is important for carriers to use a modern charging system such as Alcatel-Lucent’s SurePay solution that can handle advanced shared data plan allocation issues. Because although shared data plans are a boon both for carriers and consumers alike, the billing issues certainly aren’t welcome.
]]>For those who follow the mobile industry closely, you know that mobile service providers (MSPs) are constantly on the watch for tools that will enable them to gain a competitive edge. You are also aware from TMCnet’s coverage of the space mobile device management (MDM) is increasingly be viewed as an invaluable tool for MSPs to get better visibility into what is going on end-to-end with their customers enabling them to provide an enhanced, simpler and more customized customer experience as well as facilitate the roll out of LTE services.
One such capability that increasingly is gaining traction with MSPs around the world is Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive portfolio of Customer Experience Solutions. And, the efforts of the Motive team have not gone unnoticed. In fact, Alcatel-Lucent was recently honored with two industry awards in recognition of the work being done to help service providers forge stronger and more valuable customer relationships:
The Frost & Sullivan Award
The Growth, Innovation & Leadership Awards are presented each year to companies that are “predicted to encourage significant growth in their industries, have identified emerging trends before they became the standard in the marketplace, and have created advanced technologies that will catalyze and transform industries in the near future.”
According to the detailed report, which was prepared by F&S analyst Jeff Cotrupe, Alcatel-Lucent won the award because:
“Alcatel-Lucent’s investment in acquiring Motive has paid off by enabling Alcatel-Lucent to provide the most comprehensive CEM suite in the industry … Alcatel-Lucent has always been strong in networking and operations support systems (OSS), and it has also offered business support systems (BSS), but the company recognized the advantages of a dedicated approach to CEM, as embodied by Motive, and it has now melded Motive and Alcatel-Lucent technologies into the leading CEM offering.”
The report goes on to say that “An operator needing a CEM solution can turn to Alcatel-Lucent and know that its CEM bases are covered under one roof”.
Broadband Multimedia Marketing Association (BMMA) award
The BMMA is a nonprofit organization formed to enhance the business prospects of vendors and service providers in the telco broadband services industry. Member companies include AT&T, BellCanada, CenturyLink, Cincinnati Bell, Frontier Communications, Hawaiian Telcom, MTS Allstream, SaskTel, TDS Telecom, TELUS and Windstream.
“Each year, the BMMA recognizes teams and companies that demonstrate innovation or excellence in marketing broadband services,’’ said Ellis Hill, President of ResearchFirst, Inc., the BMMA’s operational firm. “This year’s awards went to two service providers and two vendor companies that best displayed excellence or innovation in broadband product marketing theory, practice or operations.”
In announcing the award, the Motive portfolio of Customer Experience Solutions was recognized because it “addresses the diverse needs of service providers with a comprehensive approach to customer experience transformation.”
As noted above, this is not just about earning industry recognition, it is also about success in the market. Motive is already deployed in the networks of 180 customers, with recent wins with Telefónica Argentina, BT, Belgacom and Verizon Wireless.
The fact of the matter is that consumers want more information about their mobile services, and MSPs want more visibility into their networks so they can be not just reactive but proactive in terms of providing a customer experience that engenders trust and loyalty. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that improved customer experiences are core to creating differentiated value in a world where discerning customers have access to all of their pricing options.
Studies have consistently shown in fact that in terms of service provider selection the experience really does matter, and Motive is busy helping MSPs up their game to remain viable as competition heats up including from OTTs.
]]>Shared minutes have been a wild success for mobile operators, and the family plans have become the norm. But now consumers want shared data plans, too, since according to Alcatel-Lucent one in every four mobile users will have more than one device by 2016. Currently 60 percent of consumers want shared data plans, and that number is likely to grow.
Shared data plans are a boon for operators, so this trend should be embraced.
Users on shared plans typically opt for larger data buckets, for one. More than a quarter of subscribers for one leading carrier choose a data allowance of 10 GB per month or larger, according to a recent TechZine posting by Daisy Su Senior Strategic Marketing Manager, Corporate Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent, The Case for Shared Data Plans.
Households that choose a shared data plan typically spend $30 or more per month on shared data when it is coupled with unlimited voice and SMS, also noted the blog. Carriers in the study also saw strong single-digit service revenue growth for each quarter since the launch of shared data.
Shared data plans can help carriers accelerate 4G adoption, too.
“For example, six months after two mobile carriers introduced their new data plans, smartphone penetration among postpaid subscribers grew to 67 percent and 72 percent,” wrote the blog. “Nine months after the launch, one market leader moved more than half of data traffic onto its nationwide LTE network.”
Then there is keeping customers happy.
Shared data plans offer important benefits for subscribers, according to Su.
“By using a real-time, flexible mobile charging solution, the plans make it easy for subscribers to keep track of usage in real time and manage data across all their devices, on the move,” it noted.
Subscribers who use mobile data more cost-efficiently are less likely to find unexpected usage charges, and they have fewer bills to clutter their mailbox. This adds up to a happier customer.
Paving the way for shared data plans requires some thought by carriers, however. Their LTE coverage needs to be nationwide, explains Su. They need to add capacity, as data demand will grow. Operators should segment by attaching premium postpaid subscribers to the LTE network while building a strong prepaid brand that can keep the 3G network as full as possible without requiring new investment in the network. Also, carriers need to create value by extending shared data offerings beyond the consumer to include other markets such as SMB, large enterprise, M2M and others.
But if the foundation is laid properly, carriers can reap substantial benefits from the move to shared data plans.
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