Q&A: MTN turns to CEM to deliver best-in-class experience
Zoltan Miklos, general manager for engineering at MTN South Africa, shares how the operator transformed from focusing on network operations to putting services and the user experience at the centre of everything it does.
Q: How has Huawei’s Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution enabled MTN to improve its business objectives?
Zoltan Miklos (ZM): MTN SA uses end-to-end proactive and reactive processes to focus on customer experience improvements across three business areas.
First, digital operation has been enabled through Huawei’s CEM platform, enabling supporting staff to deliver the best digital experience to our subscriber base (for voice and data service experience). Processes have also been enhanced to be more service driven. For example, using experience driven planning and optimisation to prioritise cells in poor experience areas.
Second, customer care has been enhanced by providing end-to-end customer experience visibility to customer care agents to respond to customer complaints efficiently. Finally, MTN commercial sales and marketing teams are empowered with relevant network and customer experience data to personalise offers to customers to improve their overall price and service experience.
Q: How does it allow you to be more responsive to customers’ needs?
ZM: With the CEM enabling platform, we can perform faster and more precise end-to-end customer experience problem analytics. Moreover, we have enhanced our net promotor score (NPS) and churn predictive models, giving MTN an enhanced proactive and reactive care view. The insights data obtained also can be used to enhance our marketing, network planning and operation team capability to achieve capex and opex benefits.
Q: What is required to transform from a traditional network-centric company to a user service-centric operations company?
ZM: MTN has transformed from a traditional network operations centric model to a user-service operations centric (SOC) model, with the SOC being an important engine to improve revenue, customer retention and operational efficiency.
In addition, as part of the customer experience platform deployed, MTN uses a geolocation capability which allows for service-based coverage maps to be produced from customer devices, thereby assisting in planning and optimisation activities.
The SOC focuses on services and customers, and this transformation requires a service-centric operating model that introduces and monitors new data and service KQIs; uses predictive models to correlate usage patterns with customer needs, and new skills and competencies.
Q: What business and operation performance metrics do you monitor and why?
ZM: MTN SA’s customer experience management is a closed-loop platform for measuring the customer lifecycle experience and taking those insights to action. We make use of powerful PSPU (per service per user) big data analytics, powered by Huawei’s SmartCare CEM platform, which allows for the capture, measure and analysis of the customer journey and touch points in near real time.
CEM introduces the capabilities to build prediction algorithms to predict perceived customer experience and proactively manage reasons for bad experiences.
We also use a customer experience index and key quality indicators to effectively monitor, interpret, analyse and act on customer experience issues.mer experience benchmarking, increase NPS, reduce the number of customer complaints, reduce churn, increase service usage, migrate user traffic from 2G and 3G technologies to 4G, and improve ROI.
On the experience level, first-call resolution improved 10 per cent and the mean time to correct and detect trouble tickets improved at least 30 per cent.
Q: How does the CEM help improve the customer experience?
ZM: MTN SA’s customer experience management is a closed-loop platform for measuring the customer lifecycle experience and taking those insights to action. We make use of powerful PSPU (per service per user) big data analytics, powered by Huawei’s SmartCare CEM platform, which allows for the capture, measure and analysis of the customer journey and touch points in near real time.
CEM introduces the capabilities to build prediction algorithms to predict perceived customer experience and proactively manage reasons for bad experiences.
We also use a customer experience index and key quality indicators to effectively monitor, interpret, analyse and act on customer experience issues.