Enabling the Future with ZTE Services

Over the last decades, ZTE has built the most comprehensive product portfolio in the telecom industry, covering every vertical sector of wireless, core, access and bearer networks and terminals markets. ZTE is bravely leading the way to the M-ICT digital era.

By 2018, monthly global mobile data traffic will exceed 15 exabytes—tenfold the total network traffic at the end of 2013. This 50%+ annual growth rate illustrates the challenges a carrier service provider’s (CSP) network must face to meet the demand—not only from a technology standpoint, but also and more importantly to stay on top of customer experience and service innovation. It is a daunting task for an organization to plan for, and execute such an expansion and transformation:
●   How to differentiate from competition and promote customer loyalty? How to anticipate customer demand with the most efficient use of flexible resources?
●   How to evolve the infrastructure from a traditional environment into a scalable, adaptable and cloud-ready platform? How to get ready for 5G?

Partnering with ZTE on managed services, CSPs can focus on their core business and address these challenges, relying on ZTE experts to assume responsibility for designing, building, operating and managing day-to-day network operations, whilst implementing the transformational building blocks of a successful customer centric organization.

First generation managed services engagements focused on reducing costs and improving performance through network operations automation. Building on a decade’s worth of experience and 150+ customer references, ZTE introduced advanced managed services (MS2.0) models, which align with CSP strategic objective to transform from a network and resources centric, into a customer centric organization.

A common challenge for CSP faced with the surge of mobile broadband data (MBB) services, is how to reconcile the sometimes conflicting views of the network team, proud to exhibit positive trends on network KPIs, and the marketing team, observing customer churn and dissatisfaction on services.

The reason is that operators only measure and monitor network resources elements, and remain blind to the end-to-end service perception, which goes from the device through the network and to the apps providers, compounded by customer expectations vis-à-vis the specific service he/she is using.

Customer experience management (CEM) requires an end-to-end view, combining objective measurements for network’s key performance indicators (KPI), services’ key quality indicators (KQI), and a robust, adaptive customer experience modeling framework. It also demands a systematic approach throughout the customer lifecycle, to identify, capture and prioritize the opportunities to delight customer, and proactively address problem areas and pain points before they result in a degraded customer experience.

ZTE’s VMAX CEM solution differentiates by its unified business insight data analytics solution, which allows grouping all information under a consistent framework, and creating the appropriate responses at customer, service, and network levels. This provides the single view of network quality, service quality and customer experience modeling and measurement. It closes the loop between “operations” and “customer services” teams, and generates the factual data required by marketing for introducing and evolving services in an agile way.

A Pragmatic Path Towards a Customer Centric Organization—NOC-to-SOC Transformation

According to the annual industry survey 2016 by Telecoms.com Intelligence, 43% of telecom operators plan to invest in Big Data in 2016, 47% consider investing in IoT, and 27% have high B/OSS investment on agenda. How can they ensure successful execution of the corresponding business cases?

Transforming an operator from a network-centric into a customer-centric and digital-era ready organization is not (only) about investment. This requires a thought-through, stepwise approach to ensure that all parts of the organization converge towards the common goal.

ZTE has built a pragmatic roadmap and services capabilities to assist operators on their transformation towards customer-centric companies, and de-risk the overall business case. This approach would typically include the following steps:
1.   Network optimization automation, in particular for functions such as coverage/capacity/quality analysis, or value-based capacity planning.
2.   Call center automation for MBB services, including proactive care and marketing, churn prevention, enhanced first call resolution of requests, individualized and contextual service promotion.
3.   Customer experience assurance with VIP/VAP focus, insight reporting and analytics, incident demarcation, localization and restoral.
4.   Agile service product design and orchestration, service usage insight, user behavior insight, and bill analysis.
5.   End-to-end operational efficiency and revenue maximization in the digital economy era.

For IT/network operations, the journey from network to service operations center (NOC to SOC) leads to transform from a resource oriented view of services, to a customer-oriented one, with individualized SLA matching customer needs, on-demand user assurance and proactive value-based optimization of network resources.

10 years ago, it was already predicted that the future would be mobile and video rather than voice. The advent of smartphones and MBB networks made this a reality. Tomorrow, if the much advertized IoT really takes off with billions of connected devices, the pressure on operators for 100% reliability will become immense: would you embark a driverless car with a “four 9s” SLA promise?

In the age of network function virtualization (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN), services will be orchestrated in an agile and dynamic way, and distributed across shared underlying commodity infrastructure. SDN offers programmability, agility and openness that underpins the NFV/NFVI and data centre interconnects. The virtualized infrastructure enables operators to test quickly new service concepts, launch and monetize the successful solutions, or otherwise discard with minimal investment (fail fast). NFV and SDN reduce the cost of network capacity and in turn improve the network service density.

SDN and NFV are transforming traditional networks and steer the convergence of telecoms and IT. In order to be prepared for the resulting changes in network operations, we have focused on building adequate capabilities in consulting, planning and design, engineering and system integrations.

Accordingly, ZTE has introduced revolution of operation performance (ROP) as the solution which combines the tools, processes, analytics, policies and services to intelligently orchestrate network components and deliver agile, highly reliable and customized services that customers and machines will expect and require. The best way to plan the future is to invent it.

Sichuan Telecom and ZTE partnered over the last three years to significantly overhaul the network operations and customer experience for Sichuan Telecom’s 16mn+ mobile subscribers.

ZTE deployed a data analytics platform, delivering:
●   Network optimization with automated identification of problem areas, multi-dimensional analysis, intuitive and comprehensive resolution recommendations, and automated verification of the outcomes.
●   Effective real time monitoring of key areas, which helped save 3.6 million RMB/year through innovative monitoring of 4,800 km expressways vs traditional, drive-test based method.
●   End-to-end customer experience measurement through probing, service modeling, precise RCA localization, data correlation enabling per service/per user view.
●   Automated proactive care of VIP/VAP customers.
●   Detailed marketing inputs to guide service offerings—such as terminal insight multi-dimensional analysis to measure buying patterns, and user loyalty analysis.

The system has been in production for three years, leading to more than 20% improvement on network KPI, 50% reduction in customer complaints, more than 3% points improvement in customer satisfaction (Net Promoter Score—NPS), 50 million RMB/year opex saving for optimization and operations, and 40% headcount reduction of O&M engineers.