Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I’m Richard Stone, the Solutions Manger for the Vantage for Mobile which is Compuware’s
solution for the wireless operators to actually allow themselves managing the mobile user
data experience. Vantage for Mobile is a unique product for the carriers in as much as it
allows them to manage the mobile user’s data experience. By that what we mean as opposed
to the Silo Approach that they’ve taken historically and it’s typical in data warehouse
kind of applications where you’re looking at specific parts of the delivery chain. Vantage
for Mobile turns that around 90 degrees so what we do is we start by measuring the customer’s
experience, the mobile data user experience so when a user can’t connect, we can see
instantly that it’s a failure of manual device or network; we can track that failure
always through. Typical networking tools the carriers use today you can’t get that level
of visibility, especially in real-time.
It’s one thing for a customer to not be connected, it’s another thing for the CSR
to say well if you can just wait six weeks while we go back through the logs and we’ll
tell you why you can’t get a connection, you know when you’re sitting in an airport
in Madrid. Look at what the mobile device management companies are doing and what the
traditional analytics companies are doing, they are measuring the end-user experience
but again it’s still in the silo. The mobile device manufacturer looks at it just from
the point of view when I pull my iPhone out - once the data has left the iPhone they
lose visibility all together.
The typical analytics package don’t see it until it comes into the organization and
then you have to wait six weeks to mine it. The key unique difference is what we’re
offering is this end-to-end visibility, we can see the user experience right from the
time you turn your phone on, and say for instance, I was in Madrid Airport on my way here yesterday
and I turned my phone on and a lot happens between me turning the phone on and being
able to make a phone call. There’s a lot of moving parts and what we do is from the
moment the phone is turned on and tries to make a connection we monitor that user experience
right the way down, we can give the information to the CSR; since we know the subscriber’s
name, we can bring up real-time information that the CSR requires. That result is they
go through interrogation to assistance in the first two minutes; customers all satisfied,
we can track the problem and make sure that it is working real-time so for instance, once
the CSR has figured it out that it’s a setting on the iPhone or it’s a DNS setting on the
Blackberry we can then actually see if the CSR can see in real-time data starting to
flow from that device. So we can say to the customer your device is working properly.
Three big benefits to that - customer is happy because you solved their problem in two minutes
rather than 30 minutes, fewer escalations because the CSR, the level one CSR has managed
to solve the problem but before he or she would have to escalate to Tier 2, and the
third big win for the them is we’re reducing wait times. So if you’re all sitting behind
that person who’s Blackberry won’t work in the Madrid Airport in the CSR’s queue,
rather than making you wait 30 minutes you’ve done it and had to wait two minutes so that
you win all the way around.
We have probes that sit on the network, the most probes gather, its almost 50 different
data points associated with the user. That amounts, if you work it out, and it’s real-time,
so I always like to say every byte tells a story and we monitor every byte that goes
down the network. Now clearly, you fill up a pretty large database with that data, so
what we do is: first level we monitor every byte within a rolling 15 minutes so the CSR
can go back and if you have a problem, like you said, might keep it here and they go click,
click, click oh yes, it’s like they’re using a Backberry or an iPhone they can see
in real-time back 15 minutes to see whether you’ve dropped from 3G to 2G, whether you
have a connection problems, RIMs not available and then what we do is then we go to a level
two data base where the 15 minutes of worth of data is aggregated and then we can actually
give the carrier a very good view of your experience going back to 12 months.
The unique thing is we put subscriber-aware-data together with network-aware-data cause when
you measure the user experience you also, almost by definition, you have to be network
aware. You’ve got - so we don’t monitor the state of switches, we just monitor how
the switch has performing from the user point of view, which is the same difference. So
it’s when you put those two together that the intersection tells you very quickly where
the problem is rather than just this silo view where you have to figure out; is the
problem somewhere down there. When you put that subscriber the intersection there that
when we have this very rapid way of isolating problems within the network itself. For instance,
we can detect cells that are performing badly just by looking at the user experience. If
we see a large number of users start to connect to a cell and its performance drops we can
look and see, is that the cell that’s faulty, is it a bad call, is it one of the servers
sitting on the network? So simply by monitoring user experience we can give that kind of almost
subjective information, it’s not pass or fail it’s fast or slow and we can give that
very subjective information. Ninety-nine times out of 100 the user will phone up the carrier
and say, “My device seems to be slow.” The CSR can look at and say is that’s not
my network it’s your device and so and so’s applications running. But what the carrier
can do is, they can figure out: Okay, we seem to get an awful lot of calls about this one
particular type of device, they can aggregate the information over a large number of users,
whether those users are on their network or not, we can see a device saying to the network,
“slow down, you’re sending me too much data”, back off on it, without the user
ever contacting us. We can see this traffic going up and down so we can see that a particular
type of Nokia device for instance, is generating more slowdowns and saying, whoa I can’t
cope, then say another cellular device.
So sales and marketing executives say, you know the user experience on that Sony device
or on that Nokia device is actually much better than one of the devices that we not currently
selling. The sales and marketing can then say, let’s move let’s have a special promotion
on that type of device; we know the user experience there is going to be better, and so they become
very good at acquiring your customers and reducing churn because that’s the other
thing we’re tell carriers to is; an unhappy customer is a customer in danger of churning,
the more you can help a customer with their problem the more efficiently you can do it,
the much less likely that consumer is to churn.