Contributed Content
Why private networks demand a customer experience management rethink
Private networks have come to the fore as a way to drive new revenue stream for spectrum owners, managed service providers and innovators in the field of “industry vertical solutions”. But if private networks are to successfully evolve to support new services, then both Private Network owners and communication service providers (CSP) will need to lay firm foundations in customer experience management (CEM) that take into account growing ecosystem complexity and new breed of communication service demand.
Private networks may be among today’s industry buzz words, but they are far from being a new concept. They have existed for a long time in various forms, be it campus network in colleges or as integrated network in offices. Today’s private networks, however, go far beyond the Internet access and voice calls of the past and they are attracting high levels of interest because of their ability to operate on native cellular technology with a great degree of flexibility when it comes to allocating resources and supporting a rainbow of services.
And it is because private networks can support all aspects of communications be it entertainment, education, industrial applications, autonomy in operation, security, socialization, health & safety that they require comprehensive CEM.
Why is CEM now a priority for private networks?
Networks have moved from fixed to virtualized configurations and commercial contracts can be based on dynamic requirements that are balanced to reflect demand and the supply of resources. Meanwhile the list of resources can include network capacity, storage, compute, content -- and anything else that is part of an end user’s (person or machine) requirement.
In the absence of CEM KPI monitoring, there is a danger that the business decisions related to private network resource demand are predicted and managed by assumptions that fail to reflect users’ precise needs. Either users risk end up being unhappy because they are paying too much for too little, or service providers provide too much, which in turn is inefficient or wasteful for them. CEM KPI monitoring, and analysis assists by making private network requirement decisions that satisfy both CSPs’ financial concerns and end user experience demands.
Private networks serve specific purposes for people, machines or both and their autonomy will increase considerably with evolutions in technology. CEM KPI measurement and monitoring enables contextual decision-making based on realistic “customer intent” and predictive network behaviour. This enables private networks to achieve their purpose of design and to guide improvements in experience and efficiency.
Be it entertainment content rendering or automation of an industrial process or a VR-enabled game, there is going to be complex decision-making exercise in deciding the location of algorithms, control, data, server and realizing the ambition of service excellence. The easy answer is to use the edge, but the tough question is which edge to use and then measure if that edge was actually the right edge. CEM process and KPIs are important in bringing out customer perspectives very clearly and helping with decision-making.
CEM process, the customer journey and metrics calculated in customer journey milestones provide accurate analytical inputs for extracting the customer Intent from the customer behaviour or action to define the Intent object that initiates an autonomous process which might have been implemented in a private network for a specific purpose.
Private networks offer customers dedicated usage amid an ocean of WAN. Therefore, the owner has a direct relationship with its end users, very similar to how an employee uses a office network. However, the value-chain of private networks involves multiple players, and different ones can be responsible for providing RAN, backhaul, applications/solutions, security or operations. Everyone in the value-chain has a specific role in realizing the business goal of CEM but the private network owner is the one that is accountable.
CEM is essential to benefit realization and decision-making and needs to be at the core of private network design, but it does not mean that every private network needs complex monitoring and data analytics. Instead, CEM can be seen as a new asset that is managed, improved and aligned with end-user behaviour and then realized as a virtual service where a new entity offering “CEM-as-a-service” can assist in defining person- or machine-dependent metrics based on the goal of a given private network. CEM-as-a-service could analyze data by gathering relevant “intelligent” information to derive insights and then initiate CEM-based actions through good amount of autonomy.