Telstra Scales Up - Tellabs

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What Are Your CustomersReally Experiencing?If you think monitoring network performance provides anaccurate picture of the mobile user experience, think again.By M.J. RichterMobile operators know that enough poor experiences willdrive their customers into their competitors’ arms. Thatexodus negatively impacts churn and ARPU—2 metrics thatanalysts and investors watch like hawks—while the sulliedbrand increases user-acquisition costs.But when it comes to managing the user experience,the traditional bottom-up approach of monitoring networkperformance rarely reaches the customer-experience level.In this traditional environment “the operations guys wouldanalyze the network, the billing people would analyze billingand the customer-service people would analyze performancemetrics,” said Becky Watson, principal analyst with Stratecast,a division of Frost & Sullivan.“I do not believe that operators can actually determinequality of experience unless they have a very robust analyticsstrategy. What has to happen for quality of experience to betruly realized is bringing all of that together.”Start with the User ExperienceEffectively managing the user experience requires a topdownview. That process starts with the user’s actualexperience and then drills across and down into everyaspect of the network that affects that experience at auser level.To carry out such a comprehensive inspection of everynetwork aspect, an analytics solution must be basedon enterprise analytics rather than integrated real-timeanalytics.An operator’s engineering and operations groupstypically use integrated real-time analytics tools inthe areas of policy enforcement, PCRF and security.Because there’s little data-storage capacity within thatsingle network element, integrated real-time analyticstools cannot make historical comparisons or perform anytrending analyses.Enterprise analytics, on the other hand, involves thecollection of data from multiple elements and backofficesystems across the network. It also includes the correlation ofthose information sets and their analysis to gain key insights.The ideal end-to-end analytics solution should:• Collect information from network elements, probesand back-office systems, feeding the information into ahighly scalable analytics platform.• Correlate those different information sets into unique,repeatable algorithms.• Apply analytic logic, modeling and mathematics in theform of advanced statistics and business calculus.• Produce configurable and distributable dashboards,views and reports, all tailored to meet the uniquerequirements of each business staff group, such asengineering, operations, marketing, customer careand product management, with the intent of providingactionable insights for each audience.6 | Tellabs Insight Q4 subscribe to Insight: www.tellabs.com/insight
What Are Your Customers Really Experiencing?“End-to-end analytics enables you to look at the customerexperience, isolate performance anomalies, do root-causeanalysis and make the necessary changes to the network,”said Scott Forbes, Tellabs director of professional services.“You know those changes improve the user experiencebecause you can actually measure the improvements.”“By contrast, the best an operator can do with thetraditional network monitoring approach is to focus on theavailability and performance of the network, make changesto the network and hope they improve the user experience asa result.”Analyze, Then ActUsing new analytics platforms, in conjunction with correlatingmultiple data sources in a single, centralized system,operators now can capture, monitor and measure every usersession leveraging all of the pertinent data points. Althoughthey don’t look at the content of what the user is doing, theycan see exactly how the session is performing, all the wayfrom the device through the network and out to the Internet.This design balances user concerns about privacy with theoperator’s need for deep insights.As a result, operators can take action before usershave negative experiences on the network and then callin to complain. Users typically don’t complain after 1 badexperience but rather after 4, 5 or 6 bad experiences. Bythen, they’re so frustrated that they often decide they’ve hadenough and switch to another operator.An advanced analytics solution enables engineers toproactively get ahead of problems instead of reacting to a“I do not believe that operators can actually determine qualityof experience unless they have a very robust analytics strategy.What has to happen for quality of experience to be trulyrealized is bringing all of that together.”— Becky Watson, principal analyst with Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivancomplaint by adding more capacity or applying some kind ofbandage to fix it. By constantly monitoring and measuringthe user experience, this solution enables the operator todo a targeted root-cause analysis when the user experiencedegrades. The operator then can correlate that analysiswith the user experience to determine what’s affectingthat experience and resolve the issue quickly—and beforecustomers call to complain.For example, if something in the network goes down,legacy analytics tools cannot to help the operator determinehow many users are affected or whom the affected users are.However, an advanced analytics solution can use its analyticalcapabilities to answer both questions. It can pull up theMSIDs, which are unique to each mobile customer, correlateTo help operators isolate any issue affectingthe user experience, the analytics solutioncan identify and correlate:• The specific application being used duringa good/bad/poor experience.• The time of day the customers are using it.• The components of the network that their sessionstraversed.• The websites that customers’ applications used andwhether they did so directly or via browser-basedsearches. Likewise, whether the customers were playinggames through connections to gaming servers.• The IP addresses of the websites or gaming serversand, depending on the operator’s specified level ofgranularity, the associated URLs.them with CRM data and supply relevant demographic dataabout each affected user.When the analytics solution determines that someuser experiences are degrading, the operator can examinepossible reasons and focus on the areas of the network whereanomalies are occurring: Is it a network-configuration issue? Isit some type of problem with those users’ mobile devices? Oris it something else altogether?The user experience can be rated numerically and thenranked as good, bad or poor. If a user has multiple sessionsper day, scores are correlated, providing a mean score for theoverall experience. Operators also can store these scores in adatabase for tasks such as historicaland trending analysis. Based on theuser experience data, operators canisolate which part(s) of the networkmay have degraded the experienceand do a targeted root-cause analysisto identify the actual problem.“Then expert teams can say:‘You have issue X, and we think this sub-set of users is mostlikely to churn as a result. You might want to resolve it bydoing Y, and here’s the business justification for consideringthe various options available,” Forbes said. “Through preciseroot-cause analyses, operators can actually solve underlyingnetwork problems to proactively manage the user experienceand ultimately reduce churn. This is a direct correlationbetween user experience and network performance.” •ARPU: AverageRevenue Per UserCRM: Customer RelationshipManagementMSID: Mobile SubscriberIdentificationIP: Internet ProtocolPCRF: Policy, Chargingand Rules FunctionURL: Uniform Resource LocatorSubscribe to Insight: www.tellabs.com/insight Tellabs Insight Q4 | 7
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