We have recently been involved in a mobile telecom company in the Far East. The Board's biggest issue is to grow its revenue by selling data packages. And at first glance this may not seem an obvious problem to solve using application performance management but let me explain how.
The Silo Trap
To grow revenue, Marketing will sell data packages like “unlimited Data” or “500mb per month”. The increased usage of data while accessing music and Facebook, sets the network on fire (cell sites at capacity). Users now are annoyed as they cannot use the data at the high speeds that they wanted. This is the issue of the CTO. His KPIs are to make sure that the network is looked after.
The net result is: revenue is down as new and old users leave for greener grass. The only way out is to buy further network bandwidth, which normally costs around a billion dollars.
End User Experience Tied to Profit
The solution was in two parts. First, drive profitable customers and campaigns across the network by analyzing the data being consumed and how much it costs.
Second, keep good customers by making sure end users were getting the experience they deserve.
Finding the data to analyze was easy. Sampling 3 months of data, 90 billion records, was difficult but after this we were able to tell the Board that looking at revenue/data used across users, cell sites, campaigns etc. would give them measures for driving profitability. And that it was realistically achievable.
Second, it was understood that changes to the network would need to be done, and the only way to ensure that end users did not suffer was to measure what they were experiencing. This will be done by deploying monitors on handsets and asking customers to randomly fill in surveys. This covered the subjective and objective.
Now We Can Manage What We Can Monitor
Now we have the correct measures in place. We are going to implementation - the next phase of the project. We are going to target customers that use large amounts of bandwidth and spoil the network experience for others.
We will tell you how we got on in December.
Zubair Aleem is Managing Director of Quadnet Services.
Related Links:
