There are three key areas that can determine a high performance from indoor networks
● Availability
● Performance
● Convenience
Delivering broadband services from core networks to homes is becoming less complicated, especially in urban areas. It is rather a question of the time and investment required for its deployment.
Depending on the country, the fibre to the home (FTTH) connectivity has quite an important penetration rate – it is 50% in Portugal and 32% in the UK. And though it is only 18% in Germany and 15% in France, both countries are actively working towards increasing it.
The harder is to get the user experience within a home reaching customer expectations
It can also be particularly expensive, especially when subscriber picks up the phone to call customer service.
While talking from booth to booth, I was told that between 60% and 70% of all calls made to call centres were triggered by Wi-Fi problems.
This is a major problem for telcos and it is complicated because of three key points:
1. More and more devices are being connected to the network with some being much more advanced than others (different operating Systems for example, or different Wi-Fi cards).
2. The bandwidth consumption of each device can vary greatly with some being quite greedy (while downloading videos or playing video games).
3. Customers do not think they buy high speed connection they buy Wi-Fi.
Last year, I heard the following prediction at a conference: “The competitive advantage of any provider wanting to launch products will be speed. The crucial point in this is the CPE in the home. We need to sort device-level software in the home.”
By offering performance networks, operators can create a better house-user experience.
How does one understand what is happening behind a customer’s door?
Analytics Monitoring System allows operators insights into the goings-on of a customer’s home network.
Operators work on several other such solutions:
1. Embedding analytics inside indoor products with the aim of providing the best UX (to build and maintain customer loyalty). This way, network security remains omnipresent within the home.
2. Using more and more powerful components in value added apps, such as customer premises equipment.
3. Increasing the productivity of teams in level 1 support through bot chat or virtual assistants, as well as looking at boosting customer service efficiency through the use of artificial intelligence.
4. Providing equipment to cover all areas of the home through mesh Wi-Fi or smart Wi-Fi systems.
Two indicators to monitor customer satisfaction
1. The famous Net Promoter Score, which can help operators measure customer experience and predict business growth.
2. The Customer Experience Index, as highlighted by Nokia, which was the first vendor to launch Fixed Access Health Index to benchmark fixed access network quality and performance in a standardised way.