Keeping pace with telco network service expectations

Increased reliance on high-speed Fiber and 5G connectivity networks means that customer expectations around quality, up-time, and reliability are continually rising. The communications industry has seen major changes in network speeds and how customers use connectivity. Changes have accelerated over the last four years and global internet bandwidth has almost tripled.

There has been huge growth in remote and hybrid working – according to McKinsey, 58% of workers say they can now work remotely at least part of the time. What was unimaginable a few years ago has become a reality and shifts in working patterns will continue.

More and more devices are connecting to networks. The world is more connected with mobile devices, proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), and increased ability to send large volumes of information in seconds. Rapidly growing numbers of devices are connected at home and in workplaces.

Connectivity has increasing importance for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives. IoT services such as monitoring air pollution, water quality, or waste support a positive environmental impact. Schools, hospitals, and underserved communities can be better connected. Growth in connectivity enables digital inclusion, irrespective of situation and location.

Digital payments depend on reliable connectivity. Huge growth has been seen in the use of websites and mobile apps for purchasing and digital transactions have increased rapidly. Financial inclusion is enabled with mobile payment services supporting communities in emerging markets.

Consumers place greater reliance on connectivity for entertainment and leisure. CSPs partner with content providers – Disney, Paramount, Netflix, Amazon, Comcast, and others to enable customers to watch what, when, and on whatever device they choose.

The pace of change is only going to increase, and to enable this explosion in usage and adapt to changing behaviours and rising expectations, CSPs need to provide a market leading customer experience with reliable and secure connectivity. If something goes wrong which impacts connectivity, they need to fix it quickly.

Meeting customer expectations is challenging

With increasing dependency on connectivity, fast diagnosis and resolution of issues is critical. When problems are not fixed quickly, customer satisfaction scores fall, which leads to time and cost spent resolving them or customer churn. Issues like insufficient network capacity in an area or faults related to mobile transmitters or base stations impact individuals or groups of customers, but CSPs face operational challenges and struggle to respond. The mean time to repair (MTTR) is high and customer service level agreements (SLAs) are difficult to meet.

Customer and network issues are becoming increasingly complex with more devices and technologies connected to broadband and mobile services, which leads to increasing challenges in diagnosing and resolving issues. New networks like 5G and IoT create silos, and multi-vendor, multi-technology and virtualized networks make service assurance hard.

CSPs have complex, hard-to-change systems with slow service assurance tools which are expensive to develop. Processes and workflows are code-heavy, inefficient and involve much manual work, often relying on third-party providers for diagnostic data. This makes the simplest changes to systems the hardest to complete.

A lack of standardisation in processes and workflows across business units, networks, and geographical regions creates challenges in collaborating effectively across functions and deploying new service assurance solutions quickly.

How Pega can help

Traditional routes to improve service assurance rely on tactical, quick fixes, but there’s a better way to manage workflows, quality, and costs by investing in technology that bridges the gap between business operations and enhanced customer experiences.

CSPs shouldn’t have to choose between keeping the business and networks running efficiently or transformation. They need an agile way to turn intelligence into action, remove bottlenecks and boost efficiency, all while providing fast issue resolution and empowering employees to be more productive and at their best. CSPs need a digital agility solution and an open digital architecture that enables them to develop at the speed of the business and keep core systems on a longer-term transformation plan.

Pega provides an integrated, end-to-end approach to automation of workflows in resolving exceptions like connection failures and network outages. Using case management, AI-driven optimization, and low-code collaboration, workflows become rules-based and tied to outcomes. CSPs gain the power and visibility to continuously improve.

Pega’s modern architecture makes it easy to adapt to change, manage variations, and reuse workflows in new regions, functions and networks, driving consistent outcomes everywhere. By keeping development costs down, CSPs can spend more time keeping productivity up. Integration with existing service assurance tools is easy.

CSPs can harness intelligence and eliminate cost and complexity using fault diagnostics workflows, accurately analyzing events in real-time. Workflow automation creates faster resolution and reduces expensive, environmentally unfriendly truck rolls and engineer visits. Process AI can identify patterns and highlight network issues or predict whether fixes will be successful. Causes can be addressed, and process gaps closed. Control over SLAs is gained with improved visibility and reporting. With intelligent automation, project timelines can become 4x faster and a return on investment of 598% is achievable, according to Forrester’s Total Economic Impact report.

Low code empowers CSPs to make dynamic changes and deliver results fast, all while enhancing collaboration between business users and IT. Frontline staff can be reskilled in low code development to support simpler business operations, allowing CSPs to meet the demands created by high-speed connectivity. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of applications developed by enterprises will use low code technologies – up from 25% in 2020.

Leveraging low-code and an agile approach, Vodafone empowered their citizen developers, working collaboratively with IT resources to create a guided assurance program for their broadband customer service group. Using this approach, they have achieved at least 25% improvement in speed and productivity, reduced average handling time for customer issues and increased first call resolution times and customer NPS scores.

The time to act is now

The pace of change is accelerating as CSPs provide customers with new high-speed connectivity services and this creates even more complexity in resolving customer and network issues and ensuring quality, reliability and uptime. Only Pega’s intelligent automation platform can enable CSPs to transform to meet these challenges.

Learn more:

• See how Vodafone uses low code and citizen development to simplify and automate operations.
• Hear how Google quickly triages and resolves network outages through automated processes.
• Learn how CSPs can get work done efficiently and at speed.