Operators still missing out on customer experience management
If you were made aware that your business was losing €100,000 a day because you were not charging for downloads you should have been charging for would you A) Act immediately to rectify the situation making sure the revenue losses were stopped as soon as possible, or B) Say, “Sorry, it’s nearly the weekend, we haven’t got time to fix it now.” and head off for the weekend, losing your business a further €300,000 in the process.
If the answer is B, it seems you probably work at a major T1 operator in western Europe, because, according to Oren Glanz, ceo of Service Adoption Management company Olista, just such a thing happened this year when his company flagged up a download charging problem at one operator.
Glanz’s company Olista records what happens from a user perspective during a WAP browsing or other session, by taking data from the log files from all the relevant network elements and aggregating and analyzing them, to create a record of what actually happened during a session.
For instance, Olista’s software can tell if a user reached a payment advice page, and then ended the session (which means the price probably scared him away), or if a user has repeatedly downloaded the same content (which means the user thinks he has lost the original download, or cannot find it, or indeed it never arrived – 30% of all users do this, Glaz said).
Glanz said that by creating an end-to-end view of a session per specific user, and then aggregating that information, operators can extrapolate why adoption of certain services has not been successful, and also put systems in place to boost adoption, or to take specific actions if they see the same problems occurring again.
And the results can be quite startling, even if the news is not always what operators want to hear. Glanz said his company worked with one operator that was experiencing very low rates of take up for a video download service. The operator said the reason was that it was a new service that users were not used to, but Olista was able to show that 80% of their users were getting the same content from somewhere else. This showed, Glanz said, that the users just could not find what they were looking for on the operator site.
Glanz said that in one instance, because only 10% of sessions were marked as a technical fail (ie due to engineering or network problems) an operator was missing the fact that 50% of sessions were being prematurely ended for other reasons, and of those failures 90% of users would not return. Nor was this merely a pricing issue as 95% of those who did reach the pricing advice page continued.
Glanz added that with 95% of downloads coming from the top ten items, it was clear that operators were not servicing the long tail at all. “It’s just too difficult to find and downloads content that isn’t being promoted in the top ten lists,” he said.
The Olista man also said there is evidence that browsing on operator WAP sites is still too user unfriendly, and that operators are missing a big opportunity to boost site usage, simply by ensuring that navigation is easy, customers understand the download experience and where the content will go to in their phones, and do not suffer bill shock.
Three main messages then 1. OSS-based service and application assurance solutions are not enough to get a session- specific, customer view, of what has occurred within a session, 2. Operators are still missing our on easy to convert value added services opportunities on their own WAP portals because of poor customer experience management and 3 If a problem costing you hundreds of thousands of Euros is flagged on a Friday afternoon, don’t expect your team to stay behind to fix it.