point
Menu
Magazines
Browse by year:
The Increasingly Important Role in Service Assurance for Today's Telecom Operators
Anand Gonuguntla
Co-Founder & CEO-Centina Systems, Inc.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
The communications industry has undergone radical change over the last decade. Increased competition and the rise of the Internet have forced communications service providers (CSPs) to rethink their secure positions as service providers, and increase their competitiveness in the marketplace. No longer is voice and data enough, today, service providers must offer an array of innovative enterprise wide services. Service providers must leverage their existing enterprise relationships, their network expertise, and capitalize on their strengths in the areas of reliability and service quality management.

This means that operators must look out of their telecom comfort zone for answers to these challenges. They must explore how Apple and Google are excelling at technology, innovation and marketing. They must look at the Amazons of the world and learn to target market to their customers through personalized technologies. They must, in short, reinvent themselves, and a big part of reinventing themselves is streamlining their internal operations, reducing unwanted risk, and enabling rapid service and technology deployment.

Service Assurance, once a highly technical concept within the telecom back office, has suddenly emerged at the forefront of this transformation among carriers. Where assuring that services were delivered was important, there is new meaning to an old term. New parameters are being drawn up for service assurance solutions. Today’s service assurance is the magic investment for operators, ensuring that their networks can rapidly deploy new services and technologies, while assuring the quality of the customer experience and differentiate from competition. Today’s service assurance solutions are offering operators the promise of innovation and agility—things that telcos have learned from their newfound pressures of competition and from smart enterprises outside the communications industry. But as today's communications service providers (CSPs) are faced with more challenges than ever before, operators really need to guide their technology decisions by their business demands. That means that their technology solutions must address the following key areas.

Agility: Make sure your service assurance is equally smart in network management and that the technology enables you to rapidly roll out new services quickly to meet the needs of today's demanding customers. A good solution will also help you streamline your operations and optimize your resources. Reducing Risk: Assuring quality means, lowering the probability of error and reducing time to repair the network. Customers want reliability.

Smart Planning: A Good service assurance solution will allow you to see your assets and make maintenance and forecasting that much easier.

Improving the Customer Experience: Customers do not want dropped calls or poor over-the-air quality. They want dependability from their service provider. Businesses depend on this.

Reduce Churn and Increase Customer Loyalty: With the number of companies providing communications services on the rise, customer loyalty is more important than ever. A good service assurance solution will help you improve your business so you can keep your prices manageable, and improve the quality of the customer experience at the same time.

In conclusion, CSPs need to invest in service assurance solutions to effectively compete and survive. The telecom industry is undergoing change, transformation, and incredible innovation which is forcing operators to be smart about their investments. Our advice to operators is to take a close look at their service assurance solutions. Ensure that thesesolutions can be up and running quickly, with minimal integration costs, so that they can appreciate the ROI quicker and meet the heavy demands of a very fast paced industry.

Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
facebook