Understanding REAL customer expectations could change everything for MNOs

Posted by Telecoms.com on 4/13/16 8:30 AM

Written by Steve Barefoot, senior product analyst at Interop Technologies.

MNOs are in the challenging – almost schizophrenic – position of needing to maintain a high Quality of Service (QoS ) network while concurrently finding ways to deliver agile products popularized not by QoS, but by overall Customer Experience (CX).

In a 2015 white paper, Deloitte summarized new consumer expectations – including how they’ve changed from “wanting the best” to “accepting the basics” – while research from Nielsen put “voice quality” fifth on the 

list of reasons subscribers stay with a provider. So how can understanding customer expectations today change the future for MNOs?

Understanding the mindset of the original MNO

We need to turn back the clock to understand why QoS is so ingrained in the mindset of the MNO. At the outset of the life of the MNO, customer experience was driven by a simple function of network footprint, network quality, customer service, and price. In that era, the focus was on maximizing QoS by building highly reliable and highly available networks that delivered services 99.999% of the time, in what became known as telco-grade, “five nines” service quality. Subscribers came to expect five nines as the baseline level of service from MNOs and it was encoded in MNOs’ DNA that this was the only acceptable QoS to provide.

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Topics: QoS, Messaging, Networks, over-the-top (OTT), MNOs, Voice, Consumer Expectations, Mobile Network Operator, Next Generation Networks, Value Added Services, Deloitte