With the advent of customer lifestyle services, significant emphasis has been placed recently on the real-time aspects of rating/charging and also on provisioning/activation—two parts of the three-legged stool defining today’s end-to-end customer management strategy. However, less emphasis has been given to the third leg—gaining insight about the total customer experience and in understanding the level of quality with which services are consumed.
Today’s complex services don’t always work as promised due to a long list of possibilities; within the network, with other suppliers and even with the end-customer’s user device (wireless handset, set-top box, or broadband connection). Customers generally don’t care why they experience problems and are certainly irritated if restoring their service takes very long. If a customer (consumer and/or business customer) endures repeated “negative service experiencesâ€, they will naturally churn to other operators they perceive as delivering a better and more reliable deal.