Cisco Info Center Service Quality and Customer Experience Management

An end-to-end, integrated approach, the Cisco Info Center service quality management solution, based on the market leading Tivoli Netcool technology from IBM, is designed to address the broad range of telecommunications providers’ requirements for managing both service quality and the customer experience.

Highlights

●   Rapidly assess the impact of events on availability and performance, using real-time dashboards that correlate business and technology service indicators

●   Offer service-level agreements (SLA)s to manage internal, customer, and third-party service quality as you uncover root causes of quality issues throughout the service path

●   Understand which problems are affecting the customer experience

●   Increase marketing and up-sell capabilities by proactively monitoring behavior

●   Increase closure rates for new sales and help maintain your existing customer base

●   Help control costs and increase organizational efficiency by focusing on services that are important to your customers

●   Improve customer retention through service differentiation in the marketplace

●   Manage the customer experience insightfully, using detailed analysis of the experiences individual subscribers have while using your service

●   Deliver value throughout the enterprise by sharing important service quality and customer information with multiple lines of business

●   Use modular architecture to address urgent service quality management needs immediately while building a business case for future enhancements

Cisco Info Center customer experience management delivers predefined dashboard views to break down customer data according to user needs, from account management to network operations to customer care personnel. Figure 1 is an example of a customer view.

Features and Benefits

Monitor and Manage Service Status in Real Time

Rather than manually piecing together information from multiple components to evaluate a business service, you can use real-time service status monitoring technology to quickly assess the impact of events on performance or availability. Built on IBM Tivoli Netcool technology, the Cisco Info Center real-time service status monitoring component pulls information from a broad array of resources and business support systems that define a particular service. It then displays information through business and operational dashboards tailored to specific organizational roles. The solution automatically monitors, collects, and analyzes events and dependencies from virtually any legacy or next-generation application, system, or tool, so you can proactively manage voice, video, data, and other services, as well as business-related assets that track transactions, revenue, or operational indicators.

Use this component to help you:

●   Take proactive action based on real-time indicators about the status of network services

●   Drive service management efficiencies across the enterprise using dashboards, prioritization, and monitoring capabilities

●   Reveal a better understanding of the complex relationships between business services and supporting technology

●   Customize dashboards to include any mix of views, such as scorecards, process workflow diagrams, custom gauges, charts and graphs, or geographic and location maps

No matter where information is stored, real-time service status monitoring technology can turn technical details into actionable intelligence. As you discover, detect changes, and update the full range (Layers 1-7) of your service model, you can drive efficiency and accuracy throughout your business.

The real-time service navigator capabilities combine a browser-style navigation tool with spreadsheet-style data presentation. Users access an instant view of key data metrics, and the expand-and-collapse feature allows representation of complete, complex models in a single window.

Understand the Individual Subscriber Experience in Context with Broader Service Quality Trends

Getting an accurate, detailed understanding of an individual’s service experience can be difficult - even when users make the effort to complain. With the service quality management solution from Cisco Info Center, you can get an outside-in look from the customer’s perspective and get to know your customers like never before. The customer experience management component provides a detailed analysis of each individual subscriber’s experience, correlated back to broader service quality trends that affect multiple business processes.

Cisco Info Center customer experience management monitors individual subscriber transactions with service quality aggregated by service, location, time, subscriber group, and device. Through intelligent, multidimensional analytics, it can help you understand customer behaviors across these dimensions as a way to pinpoint problems and proactively manage the customer relationship. Consider modern packet-based services, which are quite robust, with consistent rates of packet drops and errors. These services, however, are vulnerable to sudden timing delays. Traditional metrics at customer premises equipment (CPE) interfaces - usually collected over 15-minute intervals - will lose these short-period errors in the larger periods of normal behavior. Such metrics also do not identify which services are affected. While Internet browsing and email can tolerate a relatively high packet failure rate, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony cannot, so monitoring the user traffic for real indications of service interruption, such as session aborts, provides a much better indication of the user experience than you can obtain through traditional metrics.

Using customer experience management technology can help your customer care representatives to quickly identify the specific issues a subscriber is experiencing when the subscriber calls to report video delays. Then customer care personnel can determine whether it’s a unique problem that needs to be escalated - or whether it’s already being addressed as part of a broader service quality issue. The result? You can provide more effective responses to customers - and attract and retain clients who will settle for nothing less than uncompromised excellence.

Understand Which Problems Are Affecting the Customer Experience

Cisco Info Center customer experience management collects, correlates, filters, aggregates, and presents customer and network data to help you proactively make sure that all the groups in your organization focus on problems that directly affect the customer experience. Once a problem has been detected, Cisco Info Center customer experience management allows customer representatives to open a trouble ticket and then identify and take steps to minimize the impact on high-value subscribers. For example, a text message could be sent to let customers know that you are aware of the issue and that it is being repaired. You can use Cisco Info Center customer experience management to monitor service delivery and consumption and detect potential problems before they affect your customers - and your bottom line.

Use Intelligence to Prioritize Responses to Service Issues

Customer care personnel in your organization must be able to demonstrate to customers that that they are knowledgeable about service issues and responsive to individual customer needs. It is equally important for customer service representatives to know which issues have already been reported to avoid escalating them further and causing duplication in troubleshooting and resolution. Cisco Info Center customer experience management provides the detailed answers your operations and service representatives need to assure customers that your organization is aware of the problem and taking the steps necessary to resolve it. Through a single dashboard, you can provide status information on each customer’s experience, eliminating back-and-forth communication with network operations.

Cisco Info Center customer experience management helps you quickly determine:

●   If customers are able to access the available services

●   If there is a problem related to a specific customer, customer group, location, device type, or a combination of these factors

●   When the problem first arose and whether the problem has abated

●   The historical performance of one customer’s experience

Detect Potential Service Degradations Before They Affect Customers

Not only do service degradations cause costly service usage reductions, they can directly affect customer retention. Without full insight into service issues and the ability to provide information to customers immediately, the opportunity to proactively rectify the issue has passed, and the opportunity to salvage that customer relationship may have passed as well.

Built-in intelligence within Cisco Info Center customer experience management, such as key performance indicator (KPI) calculations, facilitates automated problem investigation to help speed resolution and lessen the impact on customers. The software delivers dynamic monitoring and robust reporting tools, helping you access a variety of rich data to determine which actions to take and when based on multiple revenue-affecting performance metrics.

These metrics are presented in easy-to-use web dashboards specifically designed to offer the most useful view to different users, from network operations to customer support to account management.

Cisco Info Center customer experience management delivers:

●   Near-real-time views of the individual customer experience

●   Predefined analytic views

●   Prepackaged service metrics

●   Correlation with overall service quality trends

Customer Experience Dashboards

Information is available in prepackaged dashboard views, which makes customer experience management data easily consumable by all facets of your organization. These views include:

●   Individual customer view

●   Customer segment view (prepaid, postpaid, roaming groups, and more)

●   Service view (email, voice, text, DSL, and more)

●   Device type view

●   Network (location) view

Distinguish Your Business from Competitors by Delivering Superior Service

To attract and retain high-value customers, you must be able to differentiate your offerings based on quality. Yet the quality of services delivered to customers depends on a broad set of underpinning services, such as network bearer, customer care, third-party content, and others. To accurately measure end-customer quality and isolate problems, you must first be able to assess and manage the quality of each underlying service. Rather than depend on labor-intensive data collection and error analysis of old reports, the SLA and service performance management component automatically discovers and analyzes the key causes of quality issues as they occur throughout your service path.

Cisco Info Center service quality management highlights KPIs about service quality and trends by comparing current and historical quality levels with established targets for internal, external, and third-party SLAs. It also uses cross-functional modeling of services drawn from multiple data sources to deliver complex key quality indicators (KQIs). As your infrastructure reports against agreed-upon thresholds, it warns appropriate personnel if threshold breaches are imminent. It can help your efforts to support promises of high-quality service delivery by comprehensively managing internal, external, and third-party SLAs written against your quality targets. For example, operations can more effectively manage the quality of services delivered over fixed, wireless, and IP networks in the critical early stages of rollouts.

Use the solution to:

●   Rapidly identify the source of each service issue through powerful root-cause analysis with impact analysis and explosive navigation capabilities to the network element counter level

●   Prioritize day-to-day operations - including problem resolution - based on internal SLAs, enterprise SLAs, third-party SLAs, or other business priorities

Integrate Service Quality Data with Business Processes Across Your Organization

Service quality is a broad-reaching factor that affects not only customers, but also your own business welfare. With Cisco Info Center service quality management, dynamic monitoring and robust reporting tools give you access to rich data that can help you decide which actions to take and when, based on revenue-affecting performance metrics. For example, based on the relative importance of different customers to your business, you can prioritize the business impact of current and future service impairments for specific customer segments. Then establish business processes that take these factors into account. The solution supports multiple organizational roles and lines of business, including customer care, network and service operations, account management, marketing, and management. Role-based interfaces integrate service quality data with these business processes in a meaningful, actionable way.

For example, the solution can help:

●   Market and product managers generate more targeted offers for new products and services using information about service uptake, service revenue, and cost of delivery

●   Network operations prioritize customer-affecting issues, share critical network information with customer care, and invest for the largest quality payback

●   Enterprise sales offer SLAs to key corporate users, based on accurate network data

●   Customer care respond to customers with better information about outages and repairs

●   Senior managers use information about customer retention and organizational performance to improve business performance

Address Your Most Pressing Needs First and Expand As Your Requirements Grow

The Cisco Info Center service quality management solution offers a modular approach built on a unified, integrated platform that provides a variety of ways to help you execute your service quality management initiative. Built on open, scalable architecture, the solution includes multiple off-the-shelf, service-specific components that are preconfigured to ease introduction into your portfolio - time after time.

With the solution’s extensive functionality and depth of intelligence, it can help you rapidly identify and resolve problems to keep customers happy and drive profitability and growth. By understanding the interrelated metrics of technologies, revenue-generating services, and your internal business processes, you can achieve vastly different outcomes - like prioritization of network issues based on impact, more appropriately managed communications, and an overall boost in your standards for proactive customer care.

Ordering Information

For more information on Cisco Info Center and ordering details, please contact the product marketing group at ask‑cic@external.cisco.com