The Livewire blog creates the forum for Infosys, Communication Service Providers and Media and Entertainment Companies to discuss and share insights on the key industry challenges, opportunities, trends and solutions.

April 30, 2013

Accelerating - Time to Configure

Traditionally, activation has been a backend batch-oriented system designed to make life easier for configuration engineers who made manual network changes. However, with additions of diverse set of services in the ambit of CSP and Individual Customer Basic (ICB)contracts in case of enterprise customer where terms are highly specific to a customer's need. Misconfigurations result in lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction, while provisioning delay increasingly means lost business as customers turn to operators that can deliver services faster. As a result, CSPs that offer the best customer experience of network provisioning will win business.

 

This challenged Telecom industry to revolutionize the activation system and processes otherwise it will be difficult to improve the OTA (Order to Activation) cycle and remain competitive.

 

In order to transform provisioning from a time-consuming and labor-intensive engineering function to one that is highly flexible and responsive to customer needs, CSPs need to address three key issues:

 

Speed: Reducing the time taken to configure the network for the services and specific treatments required by each customer.

Cost: Significantly lower the OPEX associated with turning on, maintaining and changing services

Customer access: Going beyond providing visibility of key service metrics to enabling self-service creation and modification of services on-demand

 

The future activation system should emphasize on collaboration and flexibility to introduce customer specific needs, quickly by:-

 

·         Integrated framework for seamless engagement of network design, operations team and Customer.

·         Flexibility to model and create device service templates.

·         Ability to aggregate device service templates into common service templates. The common service templates maps to CSPs product catalog (business) view of services.

·         Exposure of common service templates to customer directly for self-service.

·         In-built authorization mechanism to maintain the high quality (security and privacy) and sand-box area to verify the key test scenarios.

 

It should help in reducing provisioning intervals in order-to-cash journey, which directly impacts cash in-flow and customer satisfaction. The winners of the telecom game will be those who execute on these two key business aspects, especially in a tough economy.

March 18, 2013

Ruminating on an Architecture Assessment...

Recently I got a chance to assess the IT architecture of a major Telco in the North Americas. Organisations, off late, have realized that Architecture is the sole guiding light, that ensures that the IT systems design and development stays in line with business strategy and business vision, and they also want to ensure that what they have built is, in line with what everyone is building, across the industry. Sound software architecture is the key ingredient in a business or an organization's technological success. But, It is one thing to come up with a good architecture and another, to assess it. It is often said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it the maker and the beholder meet. But this is not entirely true for software architecture. The more you, as a reviewer, don't see the maker's point, the better chance you have, in judging it. Of course the fact that you should be an artist yourselves in order to appreciate or judge art applies to architecture as well.

The usual method that springs into mind when we want to evaluate architecture is the Architecture Trade off Analysis Method (ATAM). One aspect of ATAM, that makes it so widely accepted is that, it is domain agnostic, focussing mainly on the Quality attributes. It is good in a way that you are equipped with some ammunition when you are out there to assess someone's architecture, but that's not good enough when you have to make a functional assessment as well. And this is where you enter deep waters.

Domain specific industry standard bodies like TM Forum, Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), Rosetta-net, HL7 (Health Level Seven), OFX (Open Financial Exchange Consortium) provide the guiding lights here, depending on which industry you are dealing with. For example, the TM Forum spells out clearly suggestions on how your telecom applications could look like with functionality mapped to each application in its Telecom Applications Map. These suggestions carry well thought out ideas and experience from leaders across the specific industry. These suggestions could be used as benchmarks when reviewing an existing architecture.

Equipped with ATAM and knowledge of domain specific Industry guidelines you are now reasonably well armed to start out on your assessment exercise. Again that is still not enough. You still have to know what you are assessing and what your architecture is aiming to achieve. And these are uncharted waters for you.

This is where we need to understand what the architecture in question has been aimed at achieving in the first place. And this is when you need to stand in the architecture makers shoes. This will tell you to some extent on why certain aspects of the architecture have been built in specific way. This is when, you have to understand the business and IT objectives which the architecture was set to achieve. At this point it seems we are all set to validate the architecture aspects against the business and IT objectives at the enterprise level except that the business and IT objectives mean different things for different people. A "View" is the term that is used to describe exactly that. The TOGAF defines this concept as follows "A 'view' is a representation of a whole system from the perspective of a related set of concerns. A view is what is seen from a viewpoint. An architecture view may be represented by a model to demonstrate to stakeholders their areas of interest in the architecture". It is worth noting that other frameworks like IAF & FEA have similarly recognized this concept of defining a set of related concerns in more or less similar terms. Thus it is evident that different stakeholders are interested in different aspects and areas of architecture. Here comes the most important aspect that is to be kept in mind, which is the plurality of goals which may be at odds with each other. Similar to this, is the related aspect of plurality of the means, each of which provides a varying degree of help or hindrance in achieving a given goal can also be reviewed.

So the knowledge of the following aspects which contributes to the plurality of the goals and means is very important before embarking on our review,

v  Complex trade-offs that have been made while balancing objectives like functional and extra (non) functional dimensions.

v  Stakeholder involvement

v  Architectural style followed and constraints

Architecture - tree.jpg

Armed with this information, we can now proceed to review the architecture at hand. At this juncture a few words on architecture representation will not be out of place. The 4+1 view of architecture representation will be useful and handy, that can quickly give us a good view on what is being served. The logical, process, development and the deployment views combined with the use case view provide a complete representation of the architecture. Whereas Views focus on the overall structure and behaviour of the architecture, a Perspective is used to denote a term which builds on the core views to highlight the way in which a particular quality-property is addressed by the architecture. Thus perspectives could be Security perspective, Performance perspective, Availability perspective etc. Finally it is customary to serve out the review report to the interested parties spiced up with all the interesting ingredients. This takes the form a report listing the positive as well as the negative aspects of the Architecture. Yes, don't forget to serve the plus points of the architecture to start with...

 

 

September 14, 2012

Redefining customer service with SpeedSolve

Enterprise contact centers are the first touch points while dealing with customers and play a pivotal role in delivering great customer experiences.

SpeedSolve from Infosys and AT&T tries to do just that. It is a chat-based internal collaboration product. It helps enterprise contact centers reduce high call-transfer rates and call handle time. It provides a lifelike, seamless and real-time access to a pool of experts.

In a typical call center scenario, an agent might have to put a customer on-hold while they search for an appropriate response. This quest might also lead to a call-transfer to a subject matter expert. With SpeedSolve, agents can send out a chat request while continuing the phone conversation. The request is routed to an available expert who can also add the interaction to the enterprise knowledge base so that other agents can leverage it in future.

Since agents can handle multiple chat requests simultaneously, the system reacts faster than 1-2-1 help. The automatic routing engine of SpeedSolve is designed to ensure that the workload is evenly balanced among experts, and that agents reach out to the correct expert, rather than seeking help from peers.

Jointly developed by Infosys and AT&T, SpeedSolve is now available for all large and medium enterpris. Read below for more: http://www.infosys.com/newsroom/press-releases/Pages/customer-support-interactions-center.aspx

 

August 29, 2012

Customer Experience and Measures of Growth

Last week I happened to attend the Oracle Partner Advisory Council Meet @ Bangalore and got to know about latest developments in the Oracle's solution portfolio for the communication industry segment. But more than understanding the nuances of packages, I was happy as my observations and analysis on the Market Trends was validated yet again. Some of the key observations are:

It is becoming increasingly clear that the new game is being played with new rules and the old game had its own old rules. The old game where we dealt with high prices and high subscriber growth rates has fundamentally shifted to the new game of low prices and low growth rates. The drivers for this fundamental shift have primarily been the hyper competition in the developed / key developing markets and saturation of traditional services.

As a consequence the hyper competition and saturation have brought the prices (margins) down, pushing the service providers to Innovate and launch new Products & Services. (Mushrooming of Over the Top Players (OTT) can also be seen as new players trying to provide services other than the traditional telephony, voice or SMS services). Since the prices are moving downwards and also there is a need to innovate in a given budget, the Service providers are therefore forced to focus on operational efficiency in order to justify the large investments required for innovation.

In relation to this, 'How do we perceive and measure Service provider's growth' is also undergoing a gradual change across the globe. The business metrics for measuring the growth for a service provider are becoming much more granular and stringent because of multiple factors. Market Analysts though can always segregate the measures of growth uniquely for developed and developing markets however it would be safe to comment that dimensions of growth have shifted from 'No: of Added Subscribers per month' to 'monthly ARPU' and now even to 'Monthly Revenue/Cost per activity' as more and more products and services are being innovated and launched.

In this era of hyper completion and saturation, since the network, product, and devices no longer create competitive advantage as every operator offers more or less the same proposition; Innovation and Customer Experience are the only differentiating factors for a Service Provider to augment their relationship with the customers. Therefore CE and Innovation are now being considered as the potential keys to solve this conundrum.

One of the distinguished speakers of Oracle's PAC conference also stated an interesting fact that more and more service providers are now creating a position for CXO (Customer Experience Officer, the letter 'X' is no longer a substitute to letters 'E', 'O', 'I', 'F' and 'T' but now has a unique identity of itself, as 'X' stands for 'Experience') thereby further strengthening the argument that Customer Experience is being monitored by the top management and is also seen as a revenue enabler.

If we carefully observe and analyze, the theme (impact) of Customer Experience transcends to multiple areas, for instance Product Lifecycle Management, BSS and also to OSS. If in the PLM space we can comfortably say that correlation between the Product Experience and Customer Experience in increasingly becoming direct, the BSS/ OSS area is not too far as BSS and OSS vendors now have a greater need to justify and position their solutions as Revenue Enablers and not merely as solutions to reduce Service Provider's OPEX, increase efficiency and simplify the application landscape.

Customer Experience has also taken a firm positioning as one of the key domain in the business metric framework. The domain of CE and its associated value levers generally spans across the Acquisition, Retention and Efficiency subdomains. One of the key business metrics in Customer Experience domain is 'Increase in the Net Promoter Score' (NPS) which falls under the 'Retention' sub domain. NPS metric is becoming increasingly relevant at least in the developed markets. It can be as low as −100 (everybody is a detractor) or as high as +100 (everybody is a promoter). An NPS that is positive (i.e., higher than zero) is felt to be good, and an NPS of +50 is excellent. The CEOs and CXOs (Customer Experience Officer) are monitoring the increase in NPS every day and the target across the enterprise is to move the needle upwards.

In sync with this, additionally, TM Forum has also launched the business metric framework in which CE covers a large bit of attention. For details, refer to the link http://www.tmforum.org/browse.aspx?linkID=41856&docID=12759 .

Whatever said and done, old game or new game, the basics of economics and theory of evolution is still undisputed and will continue to be the same. That we need to 'adapt' and 'evolve' in order to survive.

 

July 25, 2012

Product Catalog & Solution Implementation

The world is constantly changing and so is the marketplace.

The competitive forces and increase in adoption of innovative & multifaceted business models are enforcing the Service providers to create and launch new products more rapidly and reduce product design & development cost. In order to achieve this ubiquitous business objective, many of the service providers are struggling to create consistent & effective product models in their product catalog and across multiple systems particularly CRM, Order Management, Service Design & Inventory and Billing systems. The market trends also reflect increase in adoption towards a centralized dynamic catalog strategy by Service providers. However in order to reap and realize true business benefits from an enterprise product catalog, the product designs needs to be reusable, componentized, modular and flexible such that instead of lying scattered across different systems, they provide a single agreed view between Business, IT  , Network Engineering and dispense information efficiently across multiple layers of networks.

From the above we can infer that the main drivers for adoption of Centralized Catalog solution and the need to create effective Product Models in a Service provider's environment are Competitive pressures, Faster time to market, Cost Reduction, Revenue Enhancements, Launch of new services and last but not the least, Effective and Improved Managed Product Lifecycle and Fulfilment. 

Do you want to read more? Please follow the link

http://www.infosys.com/industries/communication-services/white-papers/Pages/index.aspx

The above thought leadership has also been published as a white paper in TM Forum website. Please refer the external link:

http://www.tmforum.org/ResearchPublications/7097/home.html?q=White_Papers#TRCPublications/Link48350

July 6, 2012

Delivering a "WoW" experience to the customers...

In my earlier blog, I touched upon the trends that are re-defining the customer service and the need for having a customer centric view. In addition to providing an unmatched differentiation, an excellent service experience not only helps the enterprises in customer retention, it also provides an avenue for increasing their revenues through up-sell and word-of-mouth recommendations.

In an attempt to deliver an experience, organizations typically tend to increase their presence on multiple channels or provide newer avenues for self-service. But does merely supporting multiple channels or cutting cost through self-service necessarily yields the return on "investments" and boosts the user experience ? It is important to understand that the definition of an exceptional customer experience has evolved way beyond offering a free shipping, money-back policy or technology led touch-points. Creating a "WoW" experience is about understanding each customer uniquely and embedding your interaction touch points in the users' experience journey. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that will serve all your customers !!

In order to create a WoW experience, every customer service function needs to be evaluated based on the "Returns on Experience" that it delivers. Instead of cutting cost across the board, there is a need to evaluate objectively, cut flab at the right places and use it to boost investment into relevant functions. An incremental cost of promoting self-service to your tech-savvy, on-the-go customers might as well yield the much needed savings to budget for sending personalized cross-sell videos to your high ARPU customers. More than matching the competition in having a multi-modal presence, it is important to match the customers in their journeys across the touch points, to be able to cross-leverage the economies across the customer segments. The plethora of service options need to be blended intelligently to augment the experience delivered to every customer alongwith self-funding experience enhancement for one segment of customers with economies leveraged from another.

Creating a balance to ensure that the "Returns on Experience" evolve for every customer service function is indeed an important aspect and goes a long way into making a win-win proposition for the enterprises and their customers. 

More on this and strategies for delivering an impactful experience, in my subsequent posts - do stay tuned and keep pouring in your views :)

June 1, 2012

A day at the Imagine Park... (wave your remote good-bye!)

This year the atmosphere was charged with energy at The Cable Show as the theme 'Cable. It's more than TV. It's how we connect.' was reflected in every facet of the 3-day show in Boston.

 

As participants we experienced more than the last few years, 'From Cloud to Screen - and everything in-between' from the giants like Fox/Disney/NBCUniversal/Comcast/TWC/COX to CableLabs/Cable.NeXt/ to Amdocs/NetCracker/CSGi/CVG to Imagine-App-Challenge/StartUp-Alley. Phew - that's quite a mouthful to say and I am not even including the smaller enterprises like Espial, Audible Magic,  NetTalk, WyPlay, FlixFling, Humax, Jinni, etc. who displayed great innovations.

 

Day1: The show kicked off on the 21st in a grand manner with Neil Smit (Comcast) and Philip Kent (TBS) talking about the consumer-driven environment and television anytime anywhere focus in the market.  Our Infosys team was so engaged in going through our Imagine Park demo live test trials and mock runs that we ended up missing the exciting flash mob and Cisco dancers on the first day. Our chat show was centered around showing the new TV User Experience concepts in multi-channel natural interfaces on old cable STBs leveraging iSymphonic based-OCAP applications integrated with MS Kinect controller developed by the CATS team in our Chennai Cable Labs. We ended the day making rounds of the exhibition floor and meeting existing appreciative customers where we found our own Infosys manning their booths and connecting with distinguished luminaries such as Paul Liao, President & CEO, CableLabs and Mark Bell, VP, NCTA.

 

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/infosys-to-demonstrate-next-generation-natural-user-interface-cable-tv-concepts-at-the-cable-shows-imagine-park-152517485.html

 

Day 2: The excitement was mounting as the adrenaline pumped into our bodies before our presentation on the stage at Imagine Park.  All of us were on the same page that we had to inject energy and represent the passion of Infoscions in our global live broadcast today. We had a lot of help from our Marketing team in getting the FLYPP video to be downloaded and played to make a higher impact with the audiences... the mood went up a notch and it did the trick. Our concept demo rocked and the interview/chat sessions with VideoNuze Editor, Will Richmond, went smoothly with Mit and I discussing the Infosys Customer Experience vision, trends and innovation labs around Cable/Video/Mobile with conviction to the audience. From the pictures and press coverage, you can make out that the crowd was pleased and we had many people from the likes of Rovi, Universal Remote Control, IHS Digest, etc. walking upto us and telling us that the concept was refreshing coming from an IT Consulting firm - asking for follow-ups as well on potential partnerships.

Later as we met prospects and existing customers, we were glad to see that everyone seemed to want to see the demo again and ask for follow-up meetings. We ended the day learning that more than a 1000 concurrent live broadcast watchers enjoyed our Imagine Park talks across the globe and NCTA was really glad that they invited us to contribute at the Cable Show.  A lot of folks had presented 'second screen' products or concepts like the work we do with Unwire in Europe, but no one had uniquely presented the innovative value proposition for today's consumers and Cable MSOs keeping Customer Experience and the 'More than TV - CONNECT' theme in mind.

 

Day 3:  The Imagine App Challenge (48 hour hackathon) was coming to an end and we met all the project teams from Rutgers, Stanford, Pace, MIT, etc. to meet the smart students and talk to them about their interesting innovations which were up for judging and awards on the last day. The idea I liked the most out of project TEEVE, MyBOOST and Green Energy was MyBoost as it focused on improving the consumer experience inside the home for VoIP,  Video and Gaming activities. Incidently the Stanford team won for the MyBoost idea!

 

The event was a smashing success in our mind as we improved visibility of the Infosys brand as an innovative cable domain expertise consulting company and got a bunch of accolades from existing customers and insight into the minds of new buyers at the show.

 

 [Video clip of our demo+chat show]

http://fora.tv/2012/05/22/Control_Freak_Natural_User_Interfaces_Find_The_Way_Home

 

http://2012.thecableshow.com/vod#ooid=MycTNyNDpIRiOZpfmNonnjcOimxwWtiB,lhM3JxNDp1ByXo8hK6cuGvzZ_oPNEe6J,VsYXFyNDoJshFmqrW1WRnIed7_6Q48K4

 

May 18, 2012

Discover Natural TV at Imagine Park: Cable Show 2012

The popularity of smartphones/tablets such as the Apple iPhone & iPad has shown that user-friendly natural interface (touch & voice) technology can reach a wide range of demographics. Infosys has done research & design to not only take advantage of touch screen devices but leverage the video/gesture/voice sensor capabilities of MS Kinect™ to enable Next Generation of rich consumer experience for Live TV / VOD browsing on any interactive TV service.  Imagine a home where each family member accesses Personalized TV Content preferences in seconds via facial recognition and then browse their customized content using simple hand movements.  The intent is not just to create cool looking "Star Trek" like control feature but rather to transform the way consumers enjoy and consume  TV entertainment

Infosys are looking at  turning the concepts into reality and have been selected to present our concepts in the Imagine Park at the cable show 2012.

May 8, 2012

Customer Service redefined...

Customer service has long evolved from being an add-on capability to an imperative offering, necessary for brand differentiation. With high onboarding costs in the current competitive mix, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the service providers to attract new customers. Also, in addition to the feature based distinction, one of the main consideration that customers have when signing up for a service is the 'service experience' that they are likely to have with the service provider. There are several factors that necessitate this need for creating brand differentiation and therefore investing extensive strategies & effort into delivering an exceptional customer experience, on the part of the service provider and are primarily attributed to the following trends:

·         Preferences of customers involving use of multiple channels (contact centre, kiosk, website), multiple devices (Mobile phone, PC, TV) and multiple media (voice, text, video) to establish a contact

·         Need for the enterprises to have a unified view of the customer across the service lines

·         A personalized treatment tailored to what the customer seeks and not the standard set of FAQs that the enterprise wants to answer

·         Customers have an expectations of recieving a uniform & consistent treatment by the enterprise, across the different contact channels.

 

The trends above entail the need for the entire support and service function to be centered around the customer. To be able to efficiently serve, an enterprise must:

·         Be where the customer is

·         Know & treat every customer as a unique entity

·         Be able to co-relate customer's experience across interactions & channels to build a context

·         Be proactive in its approach to serve by pre-empting the customer needs and serving efficiently

·         Develop a customer's view of experience by leveraging the technology rather than being bound by the technological limits in defining the experience

 

All said and done, the service providers need to take a well thought out & structured approach in evaluating their customer experience strategies as the impact of a strategy gone wrong is far more than the revenue lost in not acquiring a customer. In the digital age, social media has provided more than its intended meaning to the 'word of mouth' publicity.

 

Now, the question that comes up is, "What is the mantra to make it happen ?". I would be glad to hear your views...

 

Stay tuned for more !! :)

 

January 18, 2012

Trust- Key lever in customer experience

Regaining the trust is a key theme that is emerging from today's Understanding the Customer experience seminar at Glaziers Hall London.

 

Building trust and advocacy from their customers is still a major challenge for Communication providers, resisting the desire to focus on short term profit rather than the life time value of a customer is a difficult habit to break, especially in a downturn. The rise and growth of online channels has meant "listening to the voice of the customer" as a vital ingredient to a successfull customer experience...