A TM Forum Catalyst aims to define a Customer Experience Index to support zero-touch operations in 5G networks. The project combines artificial intelligence (AI), data insights and automation techniques to help communications service providers (CSPs) enhance customer experience while reducing churn and improving cost efficiency. A TM Forum Catalyst aims to define a Customer Experience Index to support zero-touch operations in 5G networks. The project combines artificial intelligence (AI), data insights and automation techniques to help communications service providers (CSPs) enhance customer experience while reducing churn and improving cost efficiency.
Taking the pain out of improving 5G customer experience
A TM Forum Catalyst aims to define a Customer Experience Index to support zero-touch operations in 5G networks. The project combines artificial intelligence (AI), data insights and automation techniques to help communications service providers (CSPs) enhance customer experience while reducing churn and improving cost efficiency.
The companies involved in this catalyst are
Telefónica
, everis, an NTT Data company, Devo, Ericsson and Tutela.
Telefónica
is the champion of the project. As one of the world’s leading CSPs, the Spain-based group has been involved in defining the requirements that need to be solved. It has played an active role throughout the development phase through its support and input into all the decisions that were made in the early stages.
The project leader is everis, part of the NTT Data group and a multinational consultancy firm. Everis is responsible for coordinating the project and ensuring that CSP needs are fulfilled. Apart from this, the company was involved in the zero-touch development phase through its knowledge of automation tools.
Devo, a cloud-native logging and security analytics platform, was responsible for providing a big data platform into which mobile user and network data are ingested. Devo performed the necessary operations that ensured the data was fed into the artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms and contributed towards the evolution of the Customer Experience Index (
CEI)
and
key performance indicators (KPI).
Ericsson plays the role of 5G infrastructure provider in this Catalyst, providing different 5G radio nodes for the tests. The Sweden-based equipment and technology supplier also offers AI/ML capabilities to gain a deeper understanding of the network impact on the CEI. Tutela, meanwhile, provides the necessary data from the user mobile in order to be able to calculate the CEI.
Removing the pain points
Fernando Rex Lopez, Head of Network Operations Business for Europe at everis, said the Catalyst aims to offer CSPs the capability to anticipate customer pain points, and proactively implement autonomous solutions before any degradation in service takes place.
“Essentially, we want to enable CSPs to enhance the customer experience in real time through the implementation of autonomous operations that reduce human interactions to resolve network incidents,” Lopez said.
The project combines AI, data insights and automation techniques to help CSPs design, plan, optimise and operate network and IT infrastructure to improve customer experience. A closed-loop network reconfigures as needed using AI algorithms.
As noted above, the key element of the project is the definition of a CEI analytic model that correlates customers’ KPIs with satisfaction levels, and provides CSPs with a way to measure customer experience. Once the index is defined, CSPs can apply zero-touch actions in the network to assure customer experience.
The motivation for this project is that CSPs must be able to predict network performance and its impact on customer experience, and implement zero-touch operations, in order to continuously deliver the best service quality for customers.
“Our aim is to provide a platform to measure the CEI, with the goal to automatically reconfigure the network, according to the key parameters taken from previous analysis,” Lopez said.
The solution allows CSPs to anticipate and resolve any network malfunction or performance decline in order to deliver a better customer experience.
“In short, our platform will allow CSPs to design plan, optimise, and operate their network and IT infrastructure to improve customer experience through a zero touch solution,” Lopez said.
Next steps
This Catalyst is currently in the early stages, and the primary goal here is to explore and choose the best approach to solve CSPs’ main issue. The tests completed during this phase were carried out in a controlled environment, since the project is already of a certain maturity. Once the project is finished, the project team will evaluate the results and the gaps that are still needed to be completed in order to progress to the following phases of the Catalyst.
Julia Martinez Arenas, Customer Experience Manager in the global CTIO office at Telefonica, said the aim is to anticipate any malfunction or decrease of performance of the network, and thus be able to offer a better customer experience.
“This Catalyst will help us lower the need of human interaction to solve any issue and provide self-healing capabilities to the network,” Martinez Arenas said.
Visit the project space to see videos and resources for this Catalyst, and make contact with the team.