By Lv Chaodi 
Customer experience management helps improve operation and maintenance (O&M) efficiency to give a better customer experience and create a new revenue source for telcos by monetizing this experience.

Openness for timely closed-loop CEM
More telco managers are coming to realize that using customer experience to identify, delimit, position and resolve problems cannot be achieved by using customer service or network maintenance departments alone. A meaningful solution requires the cooperation of several departments in the areas of network planning, construction, maintenance, optimization, customer services, marketing, and sales. Customer experience management (CEM) enables telcos to open up internal processes, achieve deep interdepartmental collaboration, ensure an excellent end-to-end (E2E) user experience, and implement fast closed-loop management of user experience problems. 

Thanks to Huawei's CEM solution, the telco was able to use Interact, Choose, Use, and Get Help as its key points of contact. It also divided and effectively allocated tasks among different departments, and clearly defined internal collaboration processes. In doing so, the telco could ensure E2E user experience, enable fast closed-loop management, and ultimately enhance user satisfaction.

Open CEM monetizes customer experience
Customer experience management (CEM) helps improve operation and maintenance efficiency to give a better customer experience and create new revenue sources for telcos by monetizing this experience.

Telcos have access to vast amounts of user information, which they can use to generate a complete user view to gain insight into user experience and requirements. They can then reduce and prevent user churn, implement precision marketing, and increase revenue. User experience is important for every line of business, whether it involves food, clothing, shelter, transportation, healthcare, education or entertainment. Users are also willing to pay for a high-quality experience. Telcos can open their data to third parties and, by expanding cooperation in the vertical industry, better monetize user experience.

Big data-based CEM enablement platform
As an E2E user experience improvement and assurance tool, Huawei's SmartCare CEM solution is based on a deep understanding of user experience. SmartCare’s CEM enablement platform adopts the 3-tier indicator system of CEI-KQI-KPI to obtain accurate per-service, per-user and per-raster information. Moreover, by analyzing this information alongside users' demographic data, payment records, service use, traffic and packages, telcos can accurately identify user locations, preferences, habits, and social networks, thus enabling a complete user view. This provides strong insights into their requirements, which improves user experience management. APIs for the SmartCare CEM enablement platform, including the real-time location API and user preference API, can be opened for third parties to develop and utilize data. In this way, the catering and entertainment sectors, for example, can target customers with specific ads based on real-time locations. Through big data analysis of app usage habits, telcos can help VC firms perform risk assessments and significantly increase investment success rates.

To better help telcos open their data, Huawei is building open labs for its SmartCare CEM solution, and working with probe, IT and OTT companies to create an open and collaborative market environment. SmartCare CEM will be enabled in the future to integrate telco IT data, data on the NE side, user data, Internet data, and even third-party data.

Open & collaborative ecosystem
Monetizing user experience is best realized through industry cooperation. Individual companies, regardless of how powerful they may be, are no match for an open and collaborative ecosystem. Carriers, vendors, OTTs, system integrators, content providers, and users are all important members of an ecosystem. With SmartCare CEM, Huawei seeks to expand cooperation with its partners to manage user experience and achieve shared business success.

In 2014, Huawei announced the completion of the world's first Customer Experience Transformation Center (CETC). The CETC is designed to build a CEM ecosystem that leads industry development, develops solutions that cater to telcos' business goals, and achieves verifiable CEM business value. As of November 2014, four companies were working with Huawei to conduct feasibility analysis of innovative CEM solutions, which will be verified by the CETC. These companies work in fields as diverse as games, mobile payments, and satisfaction feedback management.

The CETC has also established a cooperative relationship with leading consulting firms such as Gartner, Mason, and Yankee to produce reports on user characteristics and CEM market segmentation, and explore viable business models. In addition, customers from Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific are getting involved in the CETC to design, develop, and verify solutions. The CETC makes CEM solutions transparent and visible, and enables solutions that center on user experience to be explored.

The key to business success is a strong business model. SmartCare CEM attempts to provide a superb user experience based on the XaaS business model. The enablement platform incubates innovative applications and accommodates partners to enhance service provisioning capabilities, accelerate innovation, and meet the challenges posed by an increasingly personalized, long-tail user experience. At the same time, Huawei sees its partners as the driving force for developing innovative applications, and supports them through funding and hierarchical revenue sharing, both of which aim to engender long-term benefits.

Huawei's SmartCare solution is designed to help telcos optimize user experience within an open and collaborative CEM ecosystem, and transform user experience into a potential revenue growth point as a value-added service.