Sponsored By:

Date: December 18, 2007 Time:1:00pm Eastern Time Duration:1 hour Presenters:

Andy Chalmers, Catalyst Program Director, TM Forum Lucia Gradinariu PhD, Senior Solutions Strategist, Communications, Media & Entertainment, CA

According to Collins Concise Dictionary, the terms Customer and Custom share the same root -- Custom having a definition of “Habitual patronage, especially of a shop or business”. Wikipedia has a similar definition.  The challenge for any business then, is to ensure that this habit is not broken.

The front line between the business and its customers is no longer just the shop-counter. Today, we interact on a number of levels and throughout the lifecycle, from the initial marketing, through sales, implementation, execution and assessment phases.  At each stage different people, departments and even organizations are interfacing with the same customer and the risk of allowing that customer to “break the habit” increases with every contact. Conversely, the opportunity to encourage the customer “not to break the habit” also increases with every contact.

Customers are looking for the “Internet” experience with service when buying a bundle from a Service Provider. They expect exceptional quality and reliable customer support. Such experience can be delivered if operators are in control of the service’s lifecycle through processes that allow customer self–service, automated repairing, or compensation, and customer support.

This can be assured by the quality of service monitoring of services, end to end and in real time, such as was addressed in the “AVIS” catalyst, where quality is defined per service, against customer expectation and in the context of service invocation by the customer.

In this webinar, Andy Chalmers of the TM Forum will present the case for a uniform and systematic approach to quality as a means to enhancing the customer’s experience and ensuring that they do not “break the habit”.  He will consider how the TM Forum’s NGOSS artifacts, including the eTOM Business Process Framework, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) Handbook, and the new Integrated Customer-centric whitepaper series, are complimented by appropriate applications that can be used to achieve success.  Andy will also present a case study that illustrates how this can be achieved.