The BTM Blog

Customer Experience is definitely one of the hot topics for 2008. Against a background of intense competition and with operators generally having access to similar technical and service capabilities, it is recognised that focusing on the overall Customer Experience is critical. This places challenging demands on operators’ planning, operations and support functions – not least of which is an effective mechanism for measuring and optimizing Customer Experience. Unfortunately Customer Experience is one of those terms that can mean everything or nothing depending on who and when you ask.

Here at WestGlobal we like to think we’re pretty good at helping operators and other enterprises to measure and maximise their Customer Experience. So let’s walk the talk and define exactly what we mean when we use the term. We use the visual metaphor of the Experience Cube below to explain to customers how our solution, Vantify Experience Centre, can measure Customer Experience. It works something like this….

Starting with the first 2 dimensions (X and Y for the mathematically inclined), any interaction between a Customer and an operator can be defined in terms of the service (WAP, E-commerce, Voice, Support…) or Business Activity (provision, port, blacklist….), and the channel (e.g. IVR, Point of Sale, Call Centre) over which the service is delivered. We think that any ‘real-deal’ Customer Experience measurement solution must be able to measure any combination of service and channel. The particular orientation is generally dependent on who you talk to – Line of Business owners are typically interested in measuring their service over all channels whereas operations teams are often oriented around a particular channel e.g. Call Centre, IVR.

This two dimensional view can be considered as providing an aggregate view of Customer Experience in that key metrics or KPIs such as response time and error rate can be measured for the complete service or activity, but are not resolved down to a single customer, specifically the third or ‘Z’ axis in the Experience Cube. While we have found this aggregated view is often adequate to allow performance issues or failures to be rapidly identified and resolved, there is a reasonable argument that any solution claiming to measure Customer Experience must be able to resolve issues down to the individual customer. Vantify Experience Centre supports all three dimensions, including integration into support systems such as CRM enabling customer histories to be automatically updated with any performance issues. This allows the CRM agent to be primed for any customer calls relating to the issue, shortening the investigative part of the call, reducing support cost and improving the Customer Experience

Time is the fourth dimension in the Experience Cube. Our view is that Customer Experience measurement is a continuous activity with measurements and results presented in real-time. This provides the best opportunity to identify issues, either aggregate or per individual customer, as early as possible and eliminate or at least minimize impact on Customer Experience. Certain activities such as baselining and historical analysis can be adequately supported using historical usage data

To wrap up we’d say that Customer Experience can be defined as which service or business activity via which channel for which customer and when. If you can measure all those then you’ll have a pretty good idea of your overall Customer Experience.

In our work with IT intensive enterprises, we observe different approaches to the implementation of IT and service monitoring. These range from a fragmented model dependent on multiple and effectively isolated ‘point’ solutions through to highly unified BPM (Business Process Management) models providing excellent monitoring performance but typically demanding significant investment, technology and process re-architecting and imposing restrictions on supported technologies or vendors.

In our view, the most successful approaches in terms of maximising IT ROI, technology performance and improving Customer Experience are based on a combination of pragmatism and planned coherence. Pragmatism comes from an approach that supports highly heterogeneous IT and network environments comprising multi-vendor technology deployed often over as many as 10 or more years. Coherence recognizes the need to combine different monitoring ‘models’ to achieve a rich, timely, efficient and complete view of how IT and network systems are interacting to deliver excellent Customer Experience.

At WestGlobal, we have found a 4-Quadrant grid is useful in explaining the ‘coherence’ element. On the vertical axis, ‘Monitoring Focus’ moves from Technology in the ‘South’ to Business Activity/Customer Experience in the ‘North’. The horizontal axis measures timeliness or immediacy, with non-real-time (nrt) to the West and real-time (rt) to the East. All monitoring approaches can be positioned on this grid and we can outline the key characteristics of each quadrant as follows. . .

NW (nrt/ Business Activity Focus): Business Intelligence / Data Warehouse exceptionally rich in the ability to create marketing and businesses views of customer and business activity; but ‘after the event’.

SW (nrt / Technology Focus): Historical technology performance measurement. Typically based on log and CDR file analysis and frequently used for capacity measurement and planning of underlying IT and network elements.

SE (rt / Technology Focus): Here the focus is typically on monitoring and alerting the health of individual or groups of IT / network elements or application servers (e.g. WEB servers). But this provides limited insight into actual Customer Experience which may depend on the interaction of many elements and servers.

NE (rt / Business Activity Focus): Here the focus is on measuring the health and performance of actual business activities. It is interesting that while it is this layer that the customer interacts with and can therefore reasonably be argued as the most important in measuring Customer Experience, monitoring often remains focused on the underlying technology i.e. the ‘South Side’. The emergence of Complex Event Processing as a means to enhance the performance of solutions in the NE quadrant provides excellent opportunities for enterprises to detect patterns and events that signal potential Customer Experience degradation even before the customer is impacted.

The most effective monitoring approaches reflect the need to ‘cover the bases’ in the above grid. This implies a need for organizations to have some degree of coordinated planning across the complete monitoring architecture. With such an approach, additional benefits arise from ‘Grid Synergies’. For example, while it can often be difficult for Business Intelligence solutions to access certain network or low level data directly, the data can often be proxied via elements in the real-time side of the grid. Similarly, integration between the NE and SE quadrants combines real-time Business Activity Monitoring with the ability to ‘drill-down’ into the underlying technology only when necessary, for example to investigate a degradation or failure in a Business Activity. This is approach we have adopted with Vantify Experience Centre, in other words an ‘East side’ solution.