Many communication service providers (telcos) still encounter significant challenges when presenting their services to potential Enterprise customers, says Ian Gaitley of netEvidence. Often they find that they quickly start talking about service delivery in terms of technology availability, but increasingly the Enterprise is looking to talk about the delivery of services.
The outcome is usually a set of Service Level Agreements that are difficult to deliver and not entirely relevant to the needs of the customer.
These conversations can only be improved if the providers are able to deliver meaningful service based agreements that convey what the customers are looking for – the delivery of services and applications on which their businesses depend. In short, it is about the delivery of a consistent and reliable customer / user experience.
The ability to see how the user experiences their service has proven very difficult for some providers and with the growth in outsourcing, measuring the delivery of a service is made even more complex; the provider may now be just one of a number of companies delivering the service, with each monitoring their own specific element.
Providers can look at their element of the service and take statistics from the devices they manage to check that all the components are operational, but they have no real view of how users are experiencing the service; the technology elements don’t translate into a view of the business service. So whilst the technology may be working well, if a user can’t use the service and do their job, then it’s simply not working.
The latest tools now enable providers to have visibility across the whole of a service with the ability to prove that their part of say, a SAP application or a videoconferencing system, is working correctly. This visibility must include all parts of a service so that any issues can be resolved quickly by the correct supplier and the customer is up and running as fast as possible.
Where multiple providers are involved in the delivery of a service, being able to see the service through the same lens, together with the consumer, means there is a greater likelihood for much more engaged conversations. It also gets away from the repeated accusation that one part of the delivery chain isn’t performing, minimising the time and cost involved in identifying issues that a siloed monitoring approach can often have.
Everyone involved in the delivery of a service can now see and understand exactly how users are experiencing services; and end users will be able to trust and rely on the services they consume.
In the words of JLT, one of our customers, “If you can solve problems for partners and customers, that’s wonderful; but if you can anticipate problems before they occur, then you are mining gold. That’s really powerful stuff.”
netEvidence’s product, Highlight, provides a ‘digital window’ into the performance of critical business services delivered via networks and applications. www.net-evidence.com
The author is Ian Gaitley, sales director, netEvidence
