It is time for service providers to monetize with the excellence of digital experience
COVID disruption
Digital experience – main pillar in service provider strategies
Quality of Service and Quality of Experience terms are commonly used when network quality and performance are discussed in technical terms. Digital experience in turn is broader and refers to how the end-user in practice is perceiving their service and application – which is digitally consumed from the service provider. This could mean how quickly I can connect to my service or how stable is my Teams meeting with real-time video enabled. For enterprises and health care companies the networks have become even more business critical as face-to-face interaction has become digital and completely network based.
Digital experience is what service providers offer to its customers and maximizing the excellence of that experience is among the top three pillars of every service provider. Net Promoter Score and customer churn rates are common performance indicators service providers are actively following and based on these taking corrective courses in their business if needed.
The pandemic driven demand for more bandwidth and investments has put the service quality and digital experience at risk. Especially for enterprise customers to who disruption to business processes can have a huge effect on the company as a whole.
How to reshape the network and monetize with the digital experience
Service Providers can help their business customers from coping with their services to perfecting the service for maximal productivity. For Service Provider there is an option to tap this opportunity by offering more choice for the customers with different price points. Extending the service options with new premium SLA services with better availability guarantees and tighter delays would attract specific high value customers such as critical communications, finance and telehealth to whom network quality and service availability requirements are very specific.
Whenever a new service is delivered to the customer the service provider should as standard automatically validate that the service complies with the SLA guarantees. This serves as a birth certificate for a new service. After a successful delivery the service should be continuously monitored so that any anomalies can be identified and actions taken early and efficiently, even as fully automated. Having a constant and correlated visibility not only to the network quality but also to bandwidth utilization and applications enables building a comprehensive picture of the digital experience.
Opening this same level of visibility in real-time to the end-customer via self-service Portals builds a strong trust and confidence on the service performance.
Measuring, monitoring and managing the network and service performance provides a monetization benefit both internally and externally from the service provider point of view. External monetization consists of new revenue opportunities for the service providers and value for the end-customer. Internal monetization in turn addresses service provider’s ability to optimize their network infrastructure investments without a risk of degrading the user experience. The more the existing infrastructure can be utilized and new investments optimized the better profitability can be achieved.
Performance monitoring at a mainstage
Since Digital Experience is a key asset for Service Providers there needs to be means to measure and monitor it. This is where Performance Monitoring become into play.
Performance monitoring should provide a holistic view of the entire network and each service. Since the goal is not only to enable mandatory basic SLA monitoring and reporting but also to empower the service provider to proactively identify the concerning segments in their network, their possible impact to customer services and applications and performance predictions for the future, it is clear that not all Performance monitoring systems are adequate. Moreover, ongoing adoption of 5G technologies and increased level of network automation set very specific performance requirements, which must be assured at a very accurate and granular level.
For service providers Performance Monitoring should never be an afterthought since it plays such a crucial role for service provider business. Therefore, getting a close look into the alternatives on the market and their applicability to short- and long-term network performance monitoring and digital experience excellence delivery to the customers is highly encouraged.
Want to hear more? Please, check out our on-demand webinar: