Toronto-based Redknee, which sells billing and charging software for communications service providers, announced the launch of its customer experience management offering with KPN Spain.

Following the launch of Redknee's intelligent application development tool for Interactive Voice Response, Spain's largest MVNO experienced “an immediate return on its investment due to the reduced volume of calls to its customer support center,” according to Redknee officials, “and improved the subscriber experience for its customers.”

KPN Spain is part of the KPN group, which serves more than 42 million customers combined.

KPN Spain selected Redknee's customer experience management tool as its self-care front-office service to deliver “an improved user experience to its customers,” Redknee officials said, adding that “the new generation of application and development tools for IVRs is bringing service providers greater agility, flexibility, usability and quality through automated customer care.”

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Recent consumer research from international research organization YouGov and Acision, a vendor in the mobile data field, finds that, despite the rising popularity of mobile broadband, 74 percent had experienced QoE issues.

The Quality of Experience challenges faced by U.S. carriers with the delivery of mobile broadband services extend to smartphones, laptops and other mobile handsets.

Most encountered problems with slow speeds (60 percent), poor network coverage (35 percent), inability to get connected (29 percent) and connection loss (29 percent).

Depressingly this problem isn’t getting any better, either: YouGov officials said this new research “echoes findings from a similar YouGov/Acision survey conducted in the U.K. earlier this summer.”

Other highlights from the research:

Consumers express support for increased fairness. When those surveyed were made aware of the issues surrounding the fair distribution of bandwidth, over half of consumers responded positively to an active approach to fairness aimed at distributing bandwidth between as many people as possible to ease congestion to benefit all users (63 percent). Between 30 percent and 63 percent of respondents even agreed they would be open to pay a small fee for carrier measures that meant a better broadband service.

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Octagon Research announced the results of its annual Customer Experience Survey, conducted in the third quarter of 2010, measuring “customer satisfaction, emerging needs, awareness of standards and general practices within the industry,” according to company officials.

Of the study’s respondents, twenty-two percent of respondents represented large pharmaceutical companies, while the remaining seventy eight percent represented small to mid-size enterprises. The majority of respondents were in regulatory positions within their organizations.

The survey found that 97 percent of respondents were satisfied, very satisfied or extremely satisfied overall with products and services from Octagon, 97 percent are likely or highly likely to recommend Octagon to colleagues and 98 percent believe that Octagon cares about their business.

Overall, Octagon officials said, the respondents’ knowledge and awareness of the electronic Common Technical Document submission standard “exceeds awareness of both CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium) and the emerging RPS (Regulated Product Submission) standards.”

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“The mobile Web isn’t just a novelty anymore.” If you think it is, well, it’s probably time to rid yourself of that notion.

From 4G World recently, Yankee Group announced its annual report, “Best of the Anywhere Web 2010,” which ranks mobile websites on the basis of user orientation, device and network adaptability, design and overall effectiveness.

This year’s study evaluated mobile sites across four categories: shopping, transportation, technology and mobile operators, Yankee officials said “the results are vastly improved from previous years, with 16 of the 48 evaluated sites achieving a passing grade, compared with just four sites passing in 2009 and zero passing grades in 2008.”

The findings demonstrate that “more companies are beginning to understand how to effectively mold content to users, devices and networks,” company officials noted.

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