As usual at TMW, a comprehensive conference programme ran alongside the exhibition, catalyst demonstrations, and other events. The conference programme has a number of parallel tracks and it’s always a compromise as to which to choose. This year, in between briefings and other activities, we opted for the Customer Experience Management summit.

Perhaps the most compelling element of all such TMW summits is the way in which a blend of operators, vendors and enterprises present their stories. There are fewer vendor-sponsored presentations than at other events and many more case studies that provide useful reference points. The CEM summit was no exception – and there were insightful contributions from all participants.

Customer Experience Management is a term that has been embraced by many different stakeholders. It has become a highly portable term, being used as the primary message behind a range of different offers. Indeed, it’s been adopted as a reference point by so many vendors that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand what it really means.

The CEM summit helped shed light on many of the applications for which the term has been used, with some excellent presentations and provided some strong unifying themes. We weren’t able to attend all of the sessions, but we gleaned much from those we did.

The problem is that CEM is both a specific and generic term. It’s specific, because it can apply to individual practices and issues that individually affect a customer’s experience. It’s generic, because it can apply to the totality of instances in which a customer’s experience can be impacted.

These can include customer service, sales, network performance, service quality and so on. Individually, all of these matter and there are many solutions that seek to address each. But the totality also matters – a network may perform as expected (which is difficult, in and of itself) but if customer service is poor, extreme dissatisfaction may result.

This presents challenges for network operators. The only way to address the problem is to think holistically. CEM is a discipline that touches all aspects of network and service operations, from performance in the RAN or access network, all the way to how customers are treated in retail outlets or in the call centre.

It seems that some operators are becoming aware of this. While there are plenty of solutions that address specific areas, so long as they are treated separately, operators are really only tinkering around the margins. Network operators must actively co-ordinate and connect the different solutions they deploy to address CEM into a seamless whole. Of course, this isn’t easy and, while many technical challenges have been solved, it seems that the greatest challenge of all is cultural.

This point was well made by Maja Neable from Telenor Serbia who described efforts to address CEM within her organisation. Expectations, she noted, are important – but what do people really care about? This isn’t a simple question – what one person cares about may be substantially different from another.

Maja described how Telenor Serbia had designed and implemented a process to help them both understand what their customers want and how to deliver it via a process of continuous improvement. Hardly news to those in the automotive industry, for example, but it’s certainly positive to report that practices that are well established in other businesses are being adopted within the generally more traditional telecoms industry.

In essence, the approach is orientated around discovering what people value, building positions around these needs and implementing systems to ensure deliver across all touch points. That’s holistic CEM in a nutshell, from finding out what customers want from analytics and direct interaction, all the way to ensuring that they get it, not only at the point of delivery but also in their continuing interactions with the provider. To support these initiatives, Telenor Serbia created a dedicated ‘customer’ department. And Maja’s title? Chief Customer Officer.

All of which makes perfect sense, but it’s the way in which the different elements were brought together that was interesting – and, more so, was the apparent correlation between the initiatives and the results: increases in revenue and subscribers. But it’s clear that the initiative (horizontal) depends on effectively implementing specific solutions (vertical) and, to reinforce the point, to then provide some way of connecting them together. Which is why OSS has become so important – it’s how we can create systems that address both horizontal and vertical business challenges.

Jaco Fourie, Senior BSS Expert at Ericsson had mentioned his experience of the frontline in customer service centres at Ericsson’s excellent analyst dinner on Monday. We were struck with how important a lesson such an experience can provide and the lessons it provides for initiatives such as that from Telenor Serbia.

All the predictive analytics or QoS assurance software in the world can’t help you if the agents don’t provide good service, or if you don’t listen to what someone actually thinks. What customers do on the network may be incidental to their real impression of the service provider. As we said, CEM is holistic – it has to be, by definition – and implementing it requires significant cultural change as well as technical innovation.

To be continued.

When starting out in the telecoms industry in the 1990s, one of the subjects we had to grapple with was the functionality of Intelligent Networks. You probably know what’s involved. Basically, IN (or AIN to our North American friends) provided a means by which enhanced services could be triggered, but this was a deep set of mysteries to many.

It was actually rather simple, although it took some thinking about. The triggering of a particular service was typically performed on the basis of the dialled digits and that, coupled with the associated calling line identity (OLI or CLI, depending on where you are from) could be used in the relevant service logic.

The beauty of the system was that it was centralised, with the result that local exchanges didn’t need to be capable of implementing the service logic, but could simply route the call to another destination where the triggers could be recognised and the relevant service executed.

The IN took advantage of centralised service elements, so that there was a single place in which services could be implemented, but any phone connected to the network could effectively access a service.

A typical example of an IN service was the pizza delivery application. In this case, a caller might dial a national Freephone (non-geographic) number for their favourite pizza parlour. The local exchange would route the call to a service switching point which would recognise that the call needed an IN service. It would then send a request to the service control point, requesting information on how to treat the call. In this case, the control point would recognise the non-geographic number and would translate this to a geographic number but would choose one that was nearest to the geographic location of the calling party.

This logic was illustrated in powerpoints the world over. Thus, if you were in Berlin and called your favourite German pizza vendor, you would be connected to the nearest pizza parlour to your location in Berlin. Of course, things changed – mobility entered the equation, companies started using centralised call centres and so on, but IN evolved and still provided useful services that could be managed by the service provider. They generated a lot of revenue and still do.

It was interesting, then, to hear at the WebRTC workshop that preceded the recent IMS World Forum, the classic pizza delivery model being used as an example of services that might be implemented with new WebRTC-based capabilities.

The idea is, of course, simple. Instead of just using geographic location data from an old fashioned geographic number, WebRTC can provide context through browser-enabled communications to enhance the basic service. A consumer might use a WebRTC click to call feature, combined with analytic information and a personal history to select a pizza and have it delivered, so that the call centre agent would know any special details and confirm in a real-time voice session the information required to complete the order.

By integrating with CRM data, the agent could potentially offer a better experience to the caller, just as our favourite web-shops make recommendations based on our browsing and purchasing history. If we can’t complete an online form, then we use click to call to clarify matters, rather than simply being frustrated.

In essence, WebRTC extends the possibilities of familiar services. By using this example, which makes intuitive sense, we see how an old dog can be revitalised by these new tricks – and how blending capabilities and features to create richer services could enhance our experience with retailers.

In the early days of VoIP, the net-heads complained about IN and asserted that it had been a failure. On the contrary, it generated a significant amount of value and is still the foundation of many network services. It’s how prepaid mobile works, for one thing.

Service providers continue to leverage their IN assets and have been deploying upgraded NGIN solutions for some time. Adding WebRTC to the mix broadens the capabilities on offer and points the way to a much more interesting set of services. But, at the end of the day, it’s still a pizza. Perhaps we will come up with a better poster child for such services one day!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that telecoms operators are unable to innovate. This, apparently, is axiomatic. Leading analysts reinforce this perception and anyone attending a conference will be told that the real innovation lies in the Internet industry; it’s the small and nimble companies with real focus that are able to deliver.

Well, that may be true in some cases, but it’s clearly stating too much to suggest that it is genuinely universal. Our experience shows that there are different ways in which telecoms operators demonstrate innovation. As far as we can tell, none of the service providers that we use at RMA (our mobile and fixed providers) offer anything that is innovative – except the networks on which we rely. Of course, customers tend not to pay attention to these, simply taking them for granted.

But we also know from our research activities that there are plenty of initiatives in the industry that are innovative. Perhaps one interpretation is that most telecoms operators tend not to demonstrate their innovation obviously, not in the kind of flashy ways that capture attention and, when they do, they are held up as the exception rather than the rule.

It was nice, therefore, to chat with our friend Dr Naoki Uchida from NTT Laboratories at last week’s IMS World Forum in Barcelona. He discussed NTT’s approach to innovation and the culture behind it. The term “kaizen” is well known to many as an approach that focuses on continuous innovation. It is more usually applied to heavy industry than telecoms operators but it is clear that NTT has embraced this tradition in its practices.

Dr Uchida told us that his team is responsible for creating a new service each week. The role of NTT labs is to provide technology and products to be consumed by other companies in the NTT group. According to Dr Uchida, 30% of the services they create move to trial and about 10% to production.

This means that, while most services are deemed to be non-commercial and do not survive, there is a constant process of evolution. In this, the fittest services survive; the remainder are put to rest. More importantly, it means that NTT is not afraid to take risks; services are allowed to fail, but through careful development programmes, they increase their overall chances of success.

Several presenters at the IMS World Forum spoke of the need for telecoms operators to become more like “Google”, launching services and “throwing them away” if they are unsuccessful. We can’t find data on precisely how many new services Google launches each year, although there is a wealth of data about both new services and enhancements to existing ones given in the company history on google.com . If we assume that NTT also refines existing services, then launching an average of 5 new services each year seems a reasonable return for a major operator.

Operators can innovate – clearly, not all are as active as NTT – but there are pockets of innovation. Some of that is network orientated and hence invisible to customers. But as NTT demonstrates, there can be considerable customer-facing innovation too. We have worked with companies like Avea, Turkcell, Cosmorom and others that have excellent engineering teams and produce many of their value added service portfolio in-house.

While we are reluctant to extrapolate from this (informal) sample, we wonder if it may be that NTT has the right management structure and a culture that is orientated around not just innovation but on capitalising on innovation with a clear path to market for new services. If this is correct, then it’s not that telecoms operators are congenitally incapable of innovation but rather that few of them have created the culture, processes and strategic orientation to make the most of the innovation generated by their engineering teams.

Location, in the context of mobile networks, is a topic that has been discussed for many years. It’s a fundamentally simple thing, but it’s also a can of worms, some good, and some bad. We have seen many market reports predicting a great future for services that depend on resolution of a person’s location – few of which have come true. Equally, we have seen a great deal of confusion regarding the precise nature of location and its critical role in the functioning of mobile networks. I

A year or so ago, there was a great furore about network privacy, kicked up by some WikiLeaks articles about the role of security agencies in tracking mobile users. There was a memorable press conference in which someone stood up, holding a smartphone and made the startling revelation that “if you have one of these, your mobile operator knows where you are”.

We paraphrase somewhat, but well yes, obviously: if they didn’t, it wouldn’t work. There’s clearly a great deal of ignorance about how the mobile network operates, but then why should consumers care? They just expect it to work. But there’s a difference between an operator knowing where you are so it can route calls to your smart device of choice, and using that information to send you things you don’t want or even know you are going to receive.

And it’s this borderline between legitimate use of location data (making the network work) and using it for commercial purposes that creates problems. It reminds us of the ways in which we happily surrender information to supermarkets (“do you have a clubcard?” Well, no, actually, but that’s another story) and providers like Amazon (customers who bought this also bought that – jolly useful, really), yet baulk at the somehow invidious use of mobile data by our MNO.

This is a problem. The same people who provide up to the minute details of their activity to Facebook may be upset to consider that their MNO might want to use similar information to present them with offers, services and so on. And yet, at conference after conference we are told that MNOs (and other service providers) have a unique position of trust with their customers and can act as brokers between them and other players.

Something doesn’t ring true here – if you’ll pardon the pun. We are expecting MNOs to somehow monetise the data they collect by putting it to interesting – but if we trust an OTT provider more than we trust our airtime provider, how can these new models emerge?

MNOs need to take a leadership position here. They need to make it clear that the will only use data with the permission of users (beyond doing what they need to do to make their networks function correctly) and be explicit about the benefits of using location information sensitively.

Today’s mobile consumer understands how great it is to use Google maps to pinpoint his or her location relative to where they want to be. With the right messages and propositions, MNOs ought to be able to create the same kind of trust. It’s essential that they do – if the kind of differentiated price plans that are so frequently discussed are going to evolve into innovative service offers, then this kind of trust in which context, location and activity data helps create personalised services has to be established. And MNOs should be easily able to counter the kind of paranoia that wonders why they should know where their subscribers are.

In the last few years, we have seen and heard much about the gathering momentum behind IMS. We’ve been through the early hype cycle, we’ve experienced the scepticism from some quarters, but in the main, the industry has enjoyed steady progress.

Our own early research indicated a clear commitment to deploying IMS from operators. The real issues were not if, but when, and what else could be done with the infrastructure once in place. Like so many debates, the real issue – that IMS is a strategic investment for the migration of session control towards all IP networks, a point well-made by a number of operators – were obscured by too much emphasis on business models. As we discovered, however, there weren’t necessarily clear business cases to be developed. Rather, motivation came from a variety of sources.

Last year, we felt a broad consensus had been achieved within the industry. The advent of LTE was going to drive, if not accelerate IMS deployment and we would expect to see much more focus on services, third party integration and so on, as the basic questions seemed to have been resolved, as well as many more deployments. Well, we’ve certainly seen more deployments, RFPs and the usual vendor / operator activity.

However, ahead of this year’s IMS World Forum in Barcelona , we can see that there is certainly room for debate around certain key topics. For example, the advent of OTT solutions for certain key IMS services has opened up the question, in some quarters at least, of IMS-less networks.

This leads into the whole issue of what IMS is for. It’s worth remembering that IMS is not about voice per se – it’s (eponymously) about multi-media. In fact, it’s really a session control architecture and framework that enables users to access whatever real-time services are available and to leverage applications, which may or may not be provided by the operator concerned.

Thus, the question as to whether IMS may not be needed for voice services should be seen in the wider context of managing sessions for millions of users, of which voice is but one example. And, whether voice makes any money or not, it’s still hugely important. But so too are other capabilities like mobility, messaging, emergency services, interworking, roaming and so on. IMS caters for all of these, so to view it in the context of a single service may be misleading.

This question of what IMS is for remains relevant. The real issue is where it will go in the future as voice revenues and voice consumption decline relative to other forms of communication and services. It’s time to look again at what else IMS offers for the (many) operators that have taken steps to deploy solutions.

We also have the emerging topic of WebRTC and web-enabled communication. We wrote an extensive report on WebRTC, HTML 5 and their implications for operators last year. This year, we have seen a flood of interest in the topic and are working with our clients to devise the most appropriate strategy for capturing momentum.

In the WebRTC world, there is a need to interact with non-WebRTC devices, despite the viral like proliferation of WebRTC enabled browsers that will soon take place. IMS has a role here , as even Google acknowledges – although it’s somewhat amusing to see SIP described as “legacy”. Regardless, breaking out to IMS / PSTN / PLMN end points will be critical.

The IMS World Forum, then, promises to be a key talking shop for these and other issues. We will, of course, learn from operator experience, but it’s clear that there are a number of new topics that need to be aired.

We’re looking forward to going. Just as last year, MD Guy Redmill will be chairing sessions and participating in debates. We’ll report on what we learn during and after the event. If you are planning to attend, get in touch – it will be nice to hear your perspective and catch up with old friends.