Agilent introduces customer-centric service management for wireless

Agilent Technologies came to market last week with a signaling-based service management solution known as the Agilent OSS Customer-Centric Service Manager. It is designed to identify and manage service quality issues in real-time from the end-user perspective.

As corporate wireless users begin at last to demand service level agreements, Agilent’s CCSM gives operators a way to monitor in real-time both network and service quality from various user points of view.

“Consumers live with poor quality, but corporate customers complain about quality of service,” said Cameron Stewart, wireless business development manager for Agilent. “And with their businesses moving to mobile IP, quality is a growing concern for them.”

Using the signaling-based solution, operators can determine the user experience for individuals within an organization, groups of users, specific device types or across the entire business.

CCSM alerts telecom providers to network or service problems that affect QoS using signaling and data records from links in the network and presenting measurements relating to customer experience, the network and the services.

By tracking and analyzing every call transaction in real-time, the system can help operators manage service level agreements and determine the causes of problems in the network or with end users. It helps determine problem severity based on the number or importance of affected customers and the subsequent effect on revenue.

“It’s not just about looking at network data--it’s about acting on things that are important to the customer,” Stewart said.

Service providers can set quality thresholds that, if violated, alert network operations or repair personnel to fix problems before SLAs are breached. Service providers can also use the information to proactively notify affected customers of repair status.

CCSM is integrated with Agilent's other wireless troubleshooting applications. The link between customer experience monitoring tools and network problem troubleshooting solutions helps operators better see the most prevalent errors in user sessions and determine the underlying cause.

Stewart said the data collected by the CCSM also can be used to help front-end customer service operations.