Take the Best Viewpoint: Customer Experience

Irrespective of whether you are looking at a greenfield deployment or transformation of Carrier/ICT infrastructure management, the best viewpoint would be to take the customer’s viewpoint of service experience. Based on process maturity, this could also be used in establishing those elusive OLAs (operational level agreements) between business units within the enterprise or within a carrier (Service Provider).

Whatever your preference is, whether it is for Open Source, COTS/Magic Quadrant or now the hybrid Open Source-Commercial underpinning toolsets, there are a number of options available to essentially measure customer experience of applications. These “applications” can be the typical applications that support business processes such as order management at a busy call centre (part of CRM), or VoIP (telephony), or services such as mail, DNS, authentication & authorisation, IMAP, POP3 extended by an ISP. These robot based synthetic and continuous measurement of customer experience of (applications and services) will lend as an excellent set of KPIs (key performance indicators) that could then be reported on, threshold monitored for exceptions or violations, trend analysed and linked into OLAs and SLAs (service level agreements).

The measurements can be made as complex as one would want to or just simple measurements such as response time to launch an application/screens, Cisco ipSLA based end-to-end network measurements, MOS (mean opinion scores) for VoIP/IP telephony and response times for services such as DNS. Nimsoft is a great example of a solutions provider but then again, most providers in this space would have capability. The critical factor is to gain visibility of the customer experience of service.