Improve Customer Experience

The RAN is Critical to both Understanding and Improving Customer Experience

Customer experience is the key battleground for operators. In saturated markets operators are shifting their focus from customer acquisition to customer retention driving the need to better understand and manage their customers’ experience.

The radio access network is critical to both understanding and improving customer experience across all of the touch points a customer has with an operator:

  • Sales & Marketing - key customers are located in small geographic pockets only visible to the RAN
  • Quality of Experience - network coverage and quality remain the critical drivers for voluntary churn.
  • Billing - revenues from roamers and data services are sensitive to initial RAN conditions
  • Customer Service - RAN related customer issues take longer to diagnose and resolve

Despite its importance many operators lack insight into how customers use and experience the RAN. Traditionally operators have been network centric, with management, employees and outsourcers being measured on their ability to improve overall network KPIs. Unfortunately network KPIs are a poor proxy for customer experience and lack visibility into people, places and handsets. This results in operators struggling to:

  • align resources to improve experience for their top 20% of customers
  • effectively target new network capacity for maximum ROI
  • understand the impact of new handsets on the network and customers

In addition the growing size and complexity of the RAN results in it being treated as a black box. This lack of insight into how the RAN impacts the business means that operators are unable to:

  • focus sales and marketing campaigns where their network is a differentiator
  • isolate customer experience problems caused by the RAN
  • triage RAN related problems effectively

Operators need to become customer centric, shifting their focus from network elements to people, phones and places. Being customer centric means that operators should be able to answer fundamental questions such as:

  • What is the signal strength for roamers using data cards at airports?
  • Where does poor data performance result in VIP customer churn?
  • What is the iPhone dropped call rate inside key corporate HQs?
  • Where are international roamers congregating today?

Actix’s Customer Experience Analytics solution enables operators to answer these questions. Actix’s solution combines real customer measurements with business data to provide visibility into customer experience. This is complemented by powerful RAN optimization capabilities that allow customer experience problems to be diagnosed and resolved.