Bangkok--24 Apr--Weber Shandwick Thailand
With the widespread introduction of self-optimizing network (SON) features within the radio access network (RAN), customer experience measurements are rapidly shifting toward the more relevant metric of active customer experience improvement.
The day-to-day customer experience of most subscribers is very straightforward. Every day, subscribers make and receive phone calls, have missed and dropped calls; they check Facebook, Twitter, email and the Web, in good coverage and bad. Essentially their experience comes down to whether they have good voice and data coverage. The customer experience is intimately tied with the success or shortcomings of the RAN.
This year, according to IDC, sales of smartphones overtook sales of feature phones globally for the first time. As an industry, we know that when people start using smartphones they use more data, and then start to rely on that data being universally available. As proof of that, a recent global survey by a major network equipment provider found that Internet access quality has become a deciding factor in the choice of networks in mature markets, with voice quality being key in developing markets.
The survey goes on to explain that the likelihood of subscriber wastage (defined as losing a customer unnecessarily through inaction) has increased by over 20 percent since last year. This tells the story that even with a renewed emphasis on connection quality, and data connection quality in particular, expectations are not being met by many operators. So if voice and data coverage are primary factors, how can operators best address those requirements to improve the customer experience and reduce strategically important aspects of market share loss?
In our experience most operators have moved beyond the thinking that LTE rollouts are a panacea. The most advanced operators understand that they need to manage the performance and behavior of their resources better, regardless of network access technology. So it is not surprising that many of the world's largest and most advanced mobile operators have started to look seriously at self-optimizing network (SON) technology. SON is arguably one of the few mobile technology trends over recent years that has delivered upon its initial hype, with immediate, meaningful and long-lasting improvements both for mobile operators’ businesses and subscribers’ daily experience.
Operators who have implemented SON, and especially centralized SON (C-SON), have seen impressive gains in their network performance resulting in enriched customer experiences. They have seen greater than 15 percent improvement in capacity utilization and over 20 percent improvement in dropped call rate, typically within a few hours or days after SON installation. And this all happens while substantially simplifying network management complexity.
But not all types of SON are born equally. There are two main flavors of SON, C-SON and distributed SON (D-SON). D-SON typically applies to a single node or a small localized cluster of cells, and does not allow for significant coordination across diverse infrastructure vendors' equipment. Because of these limitations, there is some concern that D-SON is already becoming an obsolete technology. C-SON, on the other hand, allows the whole network to be self-optimized because it focuses on solving quality, capacity and coverage issues across the entire network.
Another benefit of C-SON is that, as a technology, it was built to be much closer to the subscriber than many types of customer experience management tools. When operators try to measure the customer experience, very rarely does it include device-level measurements, which is where the action happens as far as the subscriber is concerned. Simply put, they are not really measuring the subscriber’s de facto experience. Most of the time operators are measuring how their own network is performing, and from there extrapolating the impact upon their subscribers. Modern C-SON systems, like those from Amdocs, are already processing tens of millions of events daily in live HetNet networks in some of the world’s largest megacities, and are able to take every single subscriber’s actions, movements and experiences into consideration when adjusting network parameterization.
With SON, the management of everyday customer experiences is entering a new and more exciting phase. Instead of the relatively incomplete definition of customer experience management, SON provides the much more relevant proactive customer experience improvement. Customer experience management as a term is not going away, but as an industry, if we are a little more pragmatic and grounded about what we need to achieve, we can see that the home of customer experience improvement is in the RAN – and it always has been.
For more information, visit Amdocs at www.amdocs.com
Media Contact:
Ruthaiwan Sinlapachan/ Siyoree Thaitrakulpanich
Weber Shandwick Thailand
Tel: 02 343 6000 ext. 067 / 183
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