Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research

11:10 AM -- One of the more impressive things about Management World is the Catalyst program, where vendors and operators are given a problem to solve and they work together to show off a solution.

My favorite of this year's bunch was this idea that Ventraq Inc. worked on with Telecom Italia SpA, Genband Inc., IBM Corp. and Network Critical Solutions Ltd. It's highlighted in the video below:

The idea was a Customer Experience Management Index (CEMI) that would help a CEO see, at a glance, whether his company was living up to customer expectations. It sounds basic but one of the things Paul Morrissey, Ventraq's VP of Strategic Solutions told me, is that this endeavor uncovered the ugly truth that nearly every operator uses a different set of key performance indicators (KPIs, in marketing parlance) to measure different facets of customer service.

For a CEMI to work, you'd have to standardize the way information is measured and communicated across the industry. The KPIs for items like how long customers sit on hold or how quickly on-premises broadband problems are resolved, for example, would have to be the same at AT&T Inc. as they are at NTT Group.

Once such a feat was accomplished, you could not only watch your own company's progress (and prevent customer churn and build a better business), but you could compare your firm to others and really make superior customer service a major competitive feature, a real benchmark in the new service provider landscape.

I really love the idea. But do you think the industry's largest operators would ever go for it?

— Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading

11:10 AM Ventraq and others devise a way to measure how operators are meeting customer needs. But could such a straightforward system ever catch on?
May 25, 2012 | Phil Harvey |


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