GlobalData Technology
11 min read
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Almost every CSP has now accepted the need to judge itself at the top level by business-level KPIs rather than technical KPIs.
This does not mean that nobody looks at technical KPIs. Rather, it means that the technical KPIs – which are still vital indicators – are subordinated to the top-level customer experience metrics (CEM). If good performance on these technical KPIs leads to higher customer satisfaction, then they can be part of the effort to improve experience. If not, then they may remain important for operations, but they should not be part of the CEM effort.
For the past decade or so, carriers’ primary CEM KPI has been Net Promoter Score (NPS); our survey shows that 71% use that or a similar customer sentiment measure. The challenges of NPS and other customer sentiment measures are well known: first, it is affected by factors not directly under a CSP’s operational control: marketing campaigns, news stories, regulations, disasters, and so on. Second, since NPS relies on customer surveys, it is difficult to understand a customer’s experience in real time. CEM systems must therefore apply sophisticated analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to model a customer’s experience in real time so that they may adjust that experience while they still have the opportunity to do so.
While NPS is by far the dominant experience metric in the industry, CSPs need a variety of metrics to see the whole picture. 57% of carriers in our survey also use a business-related KPI like churn rate to measure customer experience, under the assumption that better experiences lead to lower churn. Like NPS, churn is only measurable after it is too late to change, so CEM systems must be predictive: they must model the factors that go into these factors to determine which customers are most at risk of churning, and what service experience problems should be fixed to keep them on board.
Below these top-level KPIs, each touchpoint and stage of the customer journey will have one or more metrics attached to it. Network and service performance, naturally, are essential to experience, and are among the most conducive to real-time adjustment. Any other touchpoint that is captured should factor into these models as well. All told, scores of metrics must be correlated to address potential problems in customer experience, and to feed into the top-level KPIs. In one of the interviews we conducted for this research study, a Director at a CSP in the United Kingdom also pointed out that these sub-metrics will vary by service: demands for home broadband are different than for IoT networks, so the metrics tracked will be different as well. A CEM system must be able to judge a metric in terms of the product(s) it affects.
