When quality of experience trumps quality of service

Quality of service (QoS) isn't good enough anymore - enterprises must now tend to the user's actual experience. "When someone calls in, you need to know how they are experiencing the service," says Guy Yogev, executive VP and co-founder of Israel-headquartered Ransys Ltd.Speaking to Telemanagement at the recent Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto, Yogev talked up Ransys' Attentive software suite, which functions as a modular and customizable Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) system. Primary usage would be in a contact centre, though Yogev sees eventual applicability in the enterprise space."Traditionally, we can tell waiting times, but not customer expectations or resolution satisfaction. In today's contact centres mangers are coaches and trainers, and the customer's experience is being managed through a team."Depending on the manner in which contact was initiated, the Attentive system supports customer feedback that then flows into a dashboard for visual representation of the customer experience. The software suite also supports ongoing assessments of specific employees."We can help organizations to path calls to the right people," says Yogev. "Otherwise callers are quitting in frustration or calling back, and all of this adds to costs."Yogev would certainly find no argument with Stuart C. Wells, SVP and president global communications solutions, Avaya Inc. In conversation with Telemanagement at the Telecom Summit in Toronto, Wells argued for Avaya's concept of "graceful degradation", which expands the notion of the call centre and allows for calling to anyone in the enterprise."You need to be able to route to anyone in an organization," he says, "whether through an agent or a voice portal. With presence we can get the caller to the resident with the right capabilities."This is supposed to lead to guaranteed access, but could merely result in an expansion of the rabbit warren. Given that the employee has the option to take the call or not, and that the caller may then be shunted to voicemail, or travel back to the call centre or an IVR system, such call-system expansions could backfire.Wells argues, however, that speech analytics can help assess the caller experience, thus reducing churn significantly. This applies to everything from calls for service cancellation to credit collection.Catalin Dinulescu, product line manager for Nortel Network's Network Managed services, speaking to Telemanagement at the International Nortel Networks Users Association (INNUA) gathering in Dallas, TX, says that next steps are to take QoE into business applications, and for this to integrate with media."For example, in terms of VoIP, we have shifted from QoS at the daytime transport level for bandwidth and routing, to the upper layer, which focuses on the quality of the end user's experience."What does this mean? It means determining what the user wants, making sure application access is easy and fast, transactions have low latency, and that the service is predictable and secure. This is particularly relevant if contact centre capabilities are to be distributed throughout the enterprise, as this will involve forwarding to mobile devices and, for some, support for video as well."We have a ‘Quality of Experience' metric," says Dinulescu. "We report this to internal engineering, and also to the customers to let them know how the network is performing."Nortel's approach includes proactive voice quality monitoring, which allows for tracking service down to the handset terminal, and is supported by monitors at strategic points in the network. Calls that pass through a given node are reported if service falls below a pre-set threshold (either recommended, or established by the customer), which then raises an alarm."We have passive and active probes," says Dinulescu. "Passive needs a call to report on, whereas active does not require an end-to-end call. For active we can send test packets and simulate calls - this is scheduled with the customer."Also speaking to Telemanagement from the INNUA conference, Bridget Olson, a spokesperson for Teltronics Inc., which manufactures electronic equipment and software systems to enhance the performance of communications networks, believes that QoS becomes QoE when networks undergo "intelligent system management.""We can get end-to-end visibility of the entire infrastructure," says Olson. "This is not only for applications - we can also incorporate IP-telephony and voice quality. If we look at IP telephony as part of the network infrastructure we can offer complete coverage. Often, VoIP might be degrading because of massive demands on the data side."Where the value really comes into play, however, is when the software becomes pro-active for SLA management and offers dashboards for real-time information."We can pinpoint trends for pending service level breaches, and also for capacity planning for peaks and valleys, and adjust the resources accordingly," says Olson.For Teltronics, the next step is to move these kinds of QoS metrics further up to get some sense of QoE. To accomplish this, the company has its Mean Opinion Score or "MOS", which tries to measure human experience. The MOS is one of three fairly common assessment tools: first there are tools to assess jitter; second, packet loss; and third, an MOS. Like other companies, Teltronics has created a matrix where expectations are included for support, for response, and also for traditional services for voice and data."We find that voice support has higher expectations, whereas there is more tolerance for latency with data. However, when it comes to repair requests, data has higher expectations. As well, for moves, additions, and changes, customer phone repair response is expected within five days, whereas tolerance for data service can go out four-to-six weeks."The ante gets upped, however, when video is put in the mix. Video is the medium that encompasses the most "soft" qualities; it is also the one that puts the most stress on networks."In the past the barriers to video have been cost," says Avaya's Wells. "Now that is less of a factor, and market pressures are mounting: we had a customer that wanted video because their customer wanted it."Wells adds that video involves multiple considerations, with the role and quality of video assessed within the context of the population that an enterprise is trying to appeal to."There are two drivers for video," says Wells, "more face-time with customers, and faster decision-making. But this needs a network assessment. A lot of CIOs out there are worried about voice and video on the same network, and enterprise environments can be very complex, meaning you have to take into account all the integration points, from faxes to printers."And when it comes to quality of experience, different criteria are in play with video, such as pixelization, frame loss, and delays as channels change. All the hype around unified communications (UC) isn't worth its salt unless end-users are having a decent experience."Of course video is included in UC," says Joel Hackney, Nortel president, enterprise solutions. "If you look at Polycom, Tandberg, and Microsoft on the desktop, customers are looking to address the whole network, and this includes mobility."Video on mobile devices is already a reality, and during the Canadian Telecom Summit there was plenty of buzz about mobile broadband. However, it's as if the vendors aren't bothering to address QoE in this area, assuming that the technology, constantly improving, will take care of the issue itself. There is some truth to this, but it leaves enterprises guessing as to when they can roll out video on mobile devices for their workers.In fact, this is where the "trusted advisor" mantra on the part of vendors begins to fall apart, because they are often unwilling to say when the experience is too poor, and network costs too high, to warrant a roll out of such services to a wide range of employees.Given that these capabilities are now being talked up as QoE value-adds for enterprise-wide call centre support, it only makes sense that the vendors be forced to prove out capabilities and cost structures in the context of an organization's business requirements.

When quality of experience trumps quality of service

News | 06/29/2008 5:08 pm EDT

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