Do Customer Satisfaction surveys hold any relevance to operators Today?

A PhiMetrics Thought-Piece

This document explores how customer experience measurement using newly available methodologies can completely supplement the need for conducting Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Umang Shah 7thJuly 2013

Do Customer Satisfaction surveys hold any relevance to operators Today?

C-Sat surveys are useless today

Over 70% if CMOs and Care Heads of operators surveyed agree that C-Sat surveys hold little relevance apart from historic value. While customer satisfaction surveys are still valuable in a lot of industries, telcos cannot apply them. Here are some reasons why:

and customer perception due to the fact that these customers use high end handsets and are generally the ones with
the highest ARPUS.

Custmers facing Application related issues assign primary blame to networks:

The experience of the customer differs with each application they use. Each application has different hosting solutions as well as varied bandwidth, accessibility and latency. Due to this, a customers experience of a network or a service varies greatly with the different applications he uses. A PhiMetrics study conducted on a network revealed that different applications provide different download speeds with user experience varying from excellent to very poor on the same network.

Customers using faulty smartphones assign the blame to networks:

With the advent of the Smartphones, devices are becoming more and more complex. Different smart-phones have different experiences on the same network. As can be seen from a PhiMetrics Study conducted with various smartphones on the same network in similar conditions gives vastly different customer experience.

Users experience lower speed while downloading from itunes as it does not have a local server
(Source: PhiMetrics Service audit)

Download speed for devices vary greatly on the same network.

(Source: PhiMetrics Handset audit)

Regardless of the poor application experience, the users always tend to blame the network.

However the customer cannot see this difference and always blames the network for the issues that he faces. This usually has a negative impact on brand

Customers and Operators blame each other for bill-shocks while

Do Customer Satisfaction surveys hold any relevance to operators Today?

roaming due to back-ground updates by smart-phones

Different smartphones have different settings that enable or disable various services such as data browsing, roaming, call waiting, voicemail etc. Also a lot of phones perform various background tasks that can have a significant commercial impact in certain situations. The customer is unaware of these background processes and hence does not anticipate being charged. For e.g. A roaming subscriber uses roaming data to check emails for a short period of time and hence anticipates a small amount of data download. However due to the internal settings of the device, the phone performs several tasks such as application updates in the background which result in a significant amount of data being downloaded due to which the customer is stuck with a huge charge.

Operator has little control over C-Sat scores which reduce due to performance of above-mentioned parameters
Over 40% of issues impacting C-Sat scores among operators we surveyed arose from similar issues to the abovementioned ones, which operators have little control over. Finding them impacting their C-Sat scores and consequently their Net-Promoter-Scores renders the entire exercise irrelevant.

The Good News - the technologies that can measure C-Sat accurately exist today
In order to measure customer experience accurately and gain actionable insights from the data, a different methodology needs to be considered. This methodology can be a combination of data derived from different sources such as Mobile agents, deep packet inspection and Mystery Shopping Exercises.

Roaming data enabled for 1 minute while roaming on an LTE network

Sample Handset: iPhone 5
(Source: PhiMetrics Roaming audit)

The resulting bill shock makes the customer feel that he is being cheated by the operator while the operator has legitimately levied the roaming charges.

Customer Experience Measurement through Mobile Agents provides much more accurate information
Mobile agents can accurately measure and analyze actual customers experience.

Do Customer Satisfaction surveys hold any relevance to operators Today? Identifies Network, Application as well as service problems Real-time measurements Actual measurements taken from Customer handsets Not customer interpretation Exact Geo-location of measurements identifies where the problems are Device / Location based KPI aggregation Drilldown into identified issues Mobile Agents today have the additional benefits of universal compatibility, small footprint, low data upload and configurable measurement options that allow for minimal impact on battery life as well as little to no commercial impact on data usage. Provisioning Data

Cloud based technologies have made correlation and analysis of big data possible.
While collecting the right data from different sources has become possible, the revolution in could based analytics technology has meant that storing and analyzing the huge amount of data generated from networks is now possible. The earlier challenges of storing the data locally, implementing the infrastructure to provide access as well as analytics and securing enough bandwidth to make sure the service is effective are no longer relevant.

With Deep Packet Inspection technologies, measuring customer experience across the entire user base is now possible.
Todays networks are equipped with sophisticated probes and other measurement technologies that allow operators to measure user experience in ways that was simply not possible earlier. Most of these methods originated from the need to optimize network performance but are also well suited to measuring actual customer experience. Instances of Deep packet inspection include analyzing Reports from existing sources such as OSS Data Probe Data Roaming Platform GPEH Data MRR Data

Automated Analysis techniques have evolved to provide meaningful insights on customer experience.
Data from mobile agents, OSS based reports, Mystery Shopping exercises can be collected in real time on remote cloud based servers and analyzed to provide meaningful insights. With the development of cloud computing technology, the analysis of customer experience data can be completely automated and made available to a wider audience through customized web based reporting.

Do Customer Satisfaction surveys hold any relevance to operators Today?

(Source: 131squared)

Contact: Umang Shah Umang.shah@phimetrics.com +919892583767 www.phimetrics.com

Conclusion
While C-Sat Surveys are vital to measuring customer experience and satisfaction for other verticals, the Mobile wireless industry is uniquely poised to supplement conventional Customer Satisfaction surveys with data and subsequent analysis that is more accurate and provides a real representation of the customers experience along with an insight based approach to resolving problems.

The time is right - the technology exists, its just the vision that needs to be molded.