Making real-time customer experience management a reality

Today, we are facing a more disruptive change in the business of communications since the mobile phone went mass market more than a decade ago. More than ever, users understand what communications technology can do for them. They want broadband everywhere and high quality personalized services that are simple to use. They want full control over costs and excellent customer care when necessary.

The operators, too, face exploding complexity in their systems and processes as they introduce new services and cope with new business demands. Managing this complexity, while also delivering an individual communications experience, creating new revenue streams and raising operational efficiency, demands new ways of running the business.

The answer lies in a transformation of business processes, services, systems and technologies. Nokia Siemens Networks’ IT & Business Transformation services have been developed to help operators achieve this transformation.

Let’s find more about this transformation from our expert, Anthony Hill, who heads up Nokia Siemens Networks’ regional Business Solutions Sales Organization in West South Europe.

Operators have been successful for many years. Why do they need to transform now?

For years operators have worked with separate IT and network environments. But increasingly these areas need to intersect. And that’s because the phenomenal boom in data usage, particularly mobile data, is moving communications into the Internet environment. There is no doubt that integrated Internet-based applications that use real-time data are going to be the future differentiators. We already see operators converging their operational silos but there are immense difficulties in bringing them together efficiently. Transformation is about doing this successfully and reducing system complexity to make it less costly and faster to create integrated applications that ride seamlessly on top of the network. Transformation takes the static IT environment and integrates it with real-time network systems, enabling the operator to feed consumers’ hunger for more valuable applications. A few years ago we saw a similar move in the IT industry. It was called modernization then. The big lesson of that experience is the need to get away from point solutions and focus more on the architecture, particularly the middleware layer.

So what does this focus on the architecture mean in practice?

It means that you don’t start transformation by considering point applications. You need to develop an architectural approach and models to enable an open, flexible platform for multiple applications that can be built swiftly and cost-effectively. It’s also important to achieve standardization, something that was missing in the early days of IT modernization. Basing the design on standards such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles forces that standardization. The design must also be able to address the need to integrate the southbound network with the northbound business systems; it’s essential to be able to bring data up from the network to use in business processes. But let’s not forget the main point of transformation. The ultimate aim is to revitalize the customer experience. By integrating IT and network systems, a operator’s business processes are simplified and the customer experience can be tracked dynamically. This is a huge advance on call center response times, customer retention rates and other basic measures used by many operators today. Now we can track the customer experience all the way from the network through to the applications and do it in real-time to find out exactly what customers are doing and how well their needs are being fulfilled.

How does Nokia Siemens Networks approach the architecture challenge and what advantages does this bring to operators?

No one can predict the ultimate architecture needed and there will not be a single architecture that fits the needs of every operator. So, using our experience of best practices across the industry, we have developed models that address the integration points. These architectural models are grouped into four domains - Business Transformation, Next Generation IT, Network Transformation and Customer Care Transformation. These models can be re-used to tackle the transformation issues that arise time and time again with different operators. They provide standardized solutions to reduce complexity, increase efficiency and cut a operator’s operational costs, eliminating the need to reinvent solutions every time. Nokia Siemens Networks is in a unique position to bring real-time network management experience into the IT and applications world. We have the competence to integrate these different domains.