CEM Control Center Catalyst to Showcase Enhanced Customer Experience / Product Management Approach

Groundbreaking decision engineering and analytics technology integrated with operational monitoring: a systematic approach giving CSPs control over complexity in decision making

10 May 2010

Nice, FRANCE - Service provider champion Vodafone, together with Netezza Corporation, Nokia Siemens Networks, N-Pulse AG, Quantellia Inc., and Subex Limited, will be showcasing an innovative approach to product management decision making at TM Forum’s Management World, in Nice, France on May 18-20, 2010.  As one of TM Forum’s Catalyst projects, the team will be demonstrating how operators can better analyze their alternatives in a complex environment when making decisions affecting customer experience.

The Customer Experience Management (CEM) Control Center Catalyst shows how product management can be systematized. When making decisions about pricing and other product parameters like QoS, along with investment decisions surrounding sales training, processes, and systems, product managers can use an interactive 3D tool to understand the impact of these decisions on important financial and other outcomes such as margins, customer experience and brand.  Once the decision has been made, its impact can be monitored using an operational and customer experience monitoring dashboard that helps the CSP to focus on key performance indicators that show whether the decision needs to be reconsidered.

 “As a result of rapidly increasing competition across their service offerings, operators must take a more strategic and holistic view of customer service and customer experience management in order to gain what is perhaps the most sustainable competitive advantage a service provider can build—a satisfied and loyal customer base.”’ says Tim McElgunn, Chief Analyst at Pike and Fisher Broadband Advisory Services. “Until now, CEM has been understood in pieces: investments separate from their network impacts, separate from the impact on customers and their behaviours, costs, and revenues.  By creating an integrated framework for understanding all of these factors surrounding customer experience, the CEM Control Center concept sets a new bar for a rigorous approach to CEM decision making. Operators seeking only to maximize short term cost benefits in their approach to customer service improvement will find themselves in serious jeopardy as competition intensifies across their entire service portfolios.”

The Control Center shows how CSPs can control product rollout risk more effectively by being able to evaluate the “pros and cons” of various alternatives.  It also shows how traditional predictive analytics together with a causal model for situations where historical data is not available, can be integrated.

Nik Willetts, Senior Vice President, Communications, of TM Forum explained that “By showing how the customer experience decision making process is integrated with the monitoring of the outcome of those decisions, the CEM Control Center Catalyst demonstration is providing thought leadership for one of the most important previously unsolved problems in our industry today.”

Karl Wilhelm Siebert, Director, Regional Networks & Operations Branch West, Vodafone adds, “We see mobile broadband as a main service in Vodafone's portfolio. Advanced modeling and measurement of customer experience with mobile broadband services lays the basis to improve our product offerings in this area with the clear goal of optimizing customer value, reducing churn and improving customer loyalty.”

Service provider Vodafone champions the project that brings together seven organizations, each a leader in its own space, to demonstrate a way to improve the bottom line through managing customer experience and increasing profitability by reducing churn, increasing customer loyalty, and increasing customer advocacy.

• Netezza Corporation, the leader in data warehouse and analytic appliances for data collection and storage;
• Nokia Siemens Networks, the leader in customer insight and experience solutions for mobile, fixed and hybrid operators;
• N-Pulse AG, a consulting company with a focus on the telecommunications market to define business processes;
• Quantellia Inc., the creator of the decision engineering approach to decision making, along with 3D, multitouch software and services; and
• Subex Limited, the leader in Operations and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) domains for operational analytics.

The Customer Experience Management Control Center demonstration is located in the Forumville area at the Acropolis Congress Center in Nice, France. See for yourself how a decision engineering touchscreen is integrated with operational and customer experience monitoring dashboards, drawing data from high-performance data appliances.

The Catalyst program is the TM Forum’s innovative approach to launching and creating leading-edge solutions. It is a rapid prototyping / incubation environment where Communication Service Providers (CSPs), system integrators, and hardware/software suppliers, and the TM Forum work together to solve service-provider defined, critical industry challenges via a series of live demonstrations cumulating in creation and extension of TM Forum best practices and standards.