Digital Customer Experience Management Facilitates Operation Transformation

Digital Customer Experience Management Facilitates Operation Transformation

Zheng Jie, General Manager of China Mobile Zhejiang Branch

During the evolution from the 4G to the 5G era, the business forms and competition environments used in B2C and B2B scenarios will change greatly. The major issue for operators focuses on ways to provide optimal experience to support rapid business development and gain a new competitive edge. Because of the rapid development of IoT connections, much different from those of traditional Internet of People (IoP), operators must find methods to improve their business operations to support capabilities for IoT connections in vertical industries. However, an explosive growth of new services may lead to complaints as there will invariably be problems caused by incompatibility. For these operators, it is crucial to improve customer satisfaction. Facing these challenges, Zhejiang Mobile proactively implements digital transformation with in-house innovation and scientific practices to build a digital customer experience management system. Since its transformation, Zhejiang Mobile has made considerable business progress, and plans to share new models and experience with telecom partners worldwide, promoting the development and open cooperation of the industry.

5G goes hand in hand with the Internet of Everything, which brings personalized, customized, and differentiated customer experience solutions to customers ranging many industries. For many operators, customer experience management will transform from maintenance-driven services to operation-driven services.

Operators in the 4G era rely on providing reliable traffic to ensure profits, that is, better traffic for users will improve sales for that enterprise, with maintenance-driven customer experience management mainly used for B2C scenarios. However in the 5G era, dividends come from industries, who have proven that providing first-rate traffic to customers is more beneficial to customers than alternative business venture and customer experience management, which focuses on operation-driven services. Together, finding the right balance between these management models will help support B2C scenarios and meet the requirements of diversified B2B industry scenarios.

As the 5G era sets in, emerging services of operators will experience an explosive growth. Currently, the communications industry has gradually entered the new digital era of ubiquitous connections, customer perception, and intelligence. It is estimated that the number of global connections will reach 25 billion by 2020. 5G goes hand in hand with the Internet of Everything, which brings personalized, customized, and differentiated customer experience solutions to customers ranging many industries. For many operators, customer experience management will transform from maintenance-driven services to operation-driven services. One such operator, Zhejiang Mobile, has been implementing the "Big Connection" strategy for the past few years. This strategy integrates development services of mobile market, government and enterprise market, family market, and digital services, allowing Zhejiang Mobile to take the first steps to developing smart operations. Using big data as the driving force and the big IT platform as the support, Zhejiang Mobile improves its operation through process optimization and management upgrades. In addition, this strategy has helped improve customer experience, building new competitive advantages to become a leader in digital innovation by 2020.

Customer Experience-Oriented Digital Innovation Helps Operation Transformation

Operators in the 4G era rely on providing reliable traffic to ensure profits, that is, better traffic for users will improve sales for that enterprise, with O&M-driven customer experience management mainly used for B2C scenarios. However in the 5G era, dividends come from industries, who have proven that providing first-rate traffic to customers is more beneficial to customers than alternative business venture and customer experience management, which focuses on operation-driven services. Together, finding the right balance between these management models will help support B2C scenarios and meet the requirements of diversified B2B industry scenarios. Zhejiang Mobile applies three innovative technologies to build a digital customer experience management system, supporting the rapid development of vertical industries.

Big data technology enables assessable, visualized, and manageable service experience.

With the emergence of new services such as HD video and VR/AR, the traditional service experience evaluations based on the network data cannot accurately reflect customer habits. Many digital solutions integrate the operation platform data (cloud), network signaling data (pipe), and terminal SDK data (device) into the big data platform, accurately evaluating service experience. An E2E management solution means that service experience is more assessable than ever before, becoming a visualized method to manage customer experience, facilitating service development.

AI technology enables experience modeling of the IoT services.

AI allows you to summarize the features of IoT services, establish standard service identification rules, and implement application identification and user marking for key services using machine-learning and eDFI capabilities. From the perspective of IoT service experience, AI focuses on key services and problems, and outputs system indicators in the form of importance analyses, correlation filtering, and expert experience, supporting the large quantity of rapidly increasing daily operations in vertical industries.

Man-machine collaboration technologies build digital customer care.

Zhejiang Mobile develops the digital customer care SDK by constructing demarcation and location rule engines which run on man-machine collaboration technologies. The SDK analyzes terminals, networks, and application data, and identifies exceptions caused by terminal settings, status, network coverage, and interferences. Demarcation conclusion feedback can be delivered to the digital customer care interfaces within 20 seconds, improving customer satisfaction and reducing operation costs.

Innovative Achievements, Making Inroads with B2C and B2B Scenarios

1) "Cloud-Pipe-Device" Architecture Builds Superb Experiences for MIGU Video

Currently, developing self-operated video services is an important way for operators to monetize pipes and improve user loyalty. Only operators who are able to provide superb video experience for end users are able to develop self-operated video services on a large scale.

Together, Zhejiang Mobile and Huawei jointly built a video experience management solution based on "cloud-pipe-device" data joint analysis. This solution deploys the SDK in the terminal APPs to collect and report video experience data. The "cloud-pipe-device" data is integrated into the big data platform, ensuring accurate measurement of video experiences and multi-dimensional monitoring of 15-minute granularity, provinces/cities, and program sources. In addition, the E2E demarcation triggers the dispatch of corresponding work orders, ensuring that experience problems can be quickly resolved.

After more than one year of exploration and practice, Zhejiang Mobile are happy to report indicators of self-operated video experience are gradually increasing. The initial buffering delay has decreased from 3.2s to 2.5s and stalling ratio reduced from 2.6% to 1.6%. MIGU Video outperforms other video APPs and has won favor of customers in Zhejiang province. Its customer base is much higher than that of other video APPs. The O&M efficiency continuous to improve, and the MTTR is reduced by 75%, laying a solid foundation for self-operated video services development.

As of this release, the number of registered users of the MIGU Video exceeds 34 million with over 11 million active users per month. The overall traffic on the mobile network surpasses the provincial traffic of the Tencent Video, ranking the traffic-hungry APP first in Zhejiang province.

2) IoT E2E Experience Assurance Supports Service Operation

At present, the IoT industry is standing at the inflection point of high-speed development. Since 2018, the average monthly IoT user growth of Zhejiang Mobile has reached 3.5 million, and the services show diversified development. It is estimated that the number of connections will reach hundreds of millions at the end of 2019, posing great pressure on service operation and network O&M.

Aware of these challenges, Zhejiang Mobile has built a new IoT service quality evaluation system, which covers 55 key indicators, including core network, wireless, and ONENET platform. In terms of modeling of key service experience indicators, taking smoke sensors and Mobike (a sharing bike) as examples, Zhejiang Mobile fully implements in-depth service modeling, covering eight processes and six key experience points of both services, and fully supporting the network quality monitoring of bike sharing and abnormal smoke detection systems.

Thanks to the clear development plan and strong platform technology capabilities, the quality management of IoT services in Zhejiang province has dramatically improved and generated remarkable results. Zhejiang Mobile has established a sophisticated comprehensive indicator system, enriching the operation support methods. By the end of June 2018, the number of Zhejiang Mobile IoT connections exceeded 38 million, ranking the best among all telecommunication giants in China.

3) Digital Customer Care Builds New Service Experiences.

Explosive growth of new services may lead to more complaints. Quickly and efficiently respond to customer complaints and improve customer satisfaction are of great importance. Zhejiang Mobile and Huawei have launched the intelligent customer complaint handling solution, focusing on the following two core aspects: Identifying the causes on the user side and distribute the customer complaint pressure, and improving the front-end customer care and the backend work order demarcation capabilities, as well as shortening customer's waiting time and the work order processing time.

Identify the causes on the user side and distribute the customer complaint pressure.

Zhejiang Mobile deploys the digital customer care SDK on its APP, enabling users to enjoy self-service check for 4G services, and receive check results and suggestions anywhere 24/7. If problems are found on the user side, users can manually solve the problem by modifying the parameters of the mobile phone, alleviating complaint pressure from the Zhejiang Mobile support hotline. If problems are reported on the networks, users can submit complaint through one click on the APP instead of dialing the support hotline, improving reporting efficiency.

Improve the front-end customer care and the backend work order demarcation capabilities.

The work order system of Zhejiang Mobile provides a customer complaint intelligent handing support platform for front-end customer service personal to quickly and accurately reply to customers. For complex problems, the platform enables the front-end customer service personal to automatically create work orders and the backend work order processing engineers to quickly and accurately resolve problems, greatly shortening the complaint handling time.

Currently, the digital customer care has been integrated into the first- and second-tier customer service processes of Zhejiang Mobile, marking Zhejiang Mobile as the first operator in China to provide big data analysis and automatic intelligent processing. Since the deployment of digital customer service app SDK, it has been used an accumulated amount of over 580,000 times. Further, it has averaged over 4600 visits per day, and the demarcation accuracy has been higher than 97%, creating a new, improved online self-service complaint handling method. After the launch of intelligent support platform for customer complaint handling, the platform has 2000 visits per day, and the average complaint handling time decreases by 25.6%, greatly improving the complaint handling efficiency for Zhejiang province.

Sharing Innovation Achievements, Promoting Industry Development, and Building an International-Leading Brand Image

Zhejiang Mobile always upholds the concepts of openness, cooperation, and win-win outcomes. In the new era of rapid IoT development, we welcome telecom partners worldwide to visit and communicate with Zhejiang Mobile in order to explore and improve the digital customer experience management system, and promote the prosperity of the entire telecom industry. By June 2018, over 70 global operators have visited SmartCare? SOC showcase built by Zhejiang Mobile and Huawei for valuable reference models and experience of constructing SOC centers.

The 5G SA architecture, network slicing, and MEC scenarios are in development, but this will not stop the explosive growth of applications of vertical industries in the future. Zhejiang Mobile will continue to introduce big data, AI, and man-machine collaboration technologies to meet the ever-changing market requirements and build agile intelligent operation capabilities to provide smarter customer experience management. Future operators will need to meet the ever-growing requirements in various life scenarios, but for now, Zhejiang Mobile is ahead of the pack.