Customer Issues - Qos/Qoe As A Function of Customer Satisfaction and Retention - A Regulator'S Perspective Session 5 - ( (Day 1) )

CUSTOMER ISSUES – QOS/QOE AS A FUNCTION OF
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND RETENTION – A

REGULATOR’S PERSPECTIVE
SESSION 5 – [ (DAY 1)]

1. INTRODUCTION
Most successful businesses recognize that the customer is king, whether in the transport, energy,
financial or other sector, including the ICT sector. It is for this reason that providers of
telecommunication services must strive to deliver high quality products/services to consumers in
the sector.
The demand for high quality services by consumers has not only placed substantial pressure on
operators but this pressure has precipitated to the manufacturers of telecommunications network
as well as terminal equipment, which must be capable of providing acceptable quality.
The technological revolution that is characterized by the introduction of increasingly complex
service deployments of necessity require increasingly complex devices and high grades of
service where networks are required for the deployment of these services. This has in turn
brought about serious challenges in the attainment of desirable quality of service.
Customers on the other hand are oblivious of these challenges but expect their demands to be
met at reasonable, if not low, cost to them.
2. CUSTOMERS’ QUALITY OF SERVICE EXPECTATIONS

Many African countries have either experienced or are experiencing the mobile, other wireless
and Internet revolutions in their markets. This has led to a high proliferation of mobile telephony
users in the continent.
The recent landing of submarine cables on the East African coast has now brought about some
growth in Internet Access penetration, which is expected to improve in due course. In many of
these countries, however, the growth of fixed line telephony has to a large extent been marginal,
if any.
This means that for the majority of African countries, many customers now have a higher
likelihood of encountering quality of service challenges in relation to wireless systems, including
wireless Internet, than those related to fixed line systems.
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Customers’ Quality of Service/Experience Expectations from Service providers &
Equipment Suppliers
To accurately determine customer expectations, service providers must obviously understand

what drives their demand for ICT services in the market. This is influenced by several factors
ranging from the age of a customer, through the socio-economic group to the type of customer –
whether an individual or an organization. To properly address the quality of service requirements
of customers, it is important to classify them into the two broad categories of individual and
corporate customers is the practice currently.
Individual users’ Expectations

The individual’s communications requirements are mainly driven by their social communications
needs, for which, texting as well as Internet access now feature as the Key means of
communication and to a lesser extent, voice for the better resourced. Whereas there may be latent
demand for Multimedia applications in the market, the cost of bandwidth may still be a key
impediment to their uptake in the market, especially where volume based pricing is in force.
This group would therefore have a greater interest in the quality of texting, Internet services and
multimedia services and the quality of service parameters related to these services. The
proliferation of premium content and other value added services often provided by third party
providers has increased in popularity over the past three to four years in many parts of Africa.
This has introduced a new class of players in the market who are oft characterized anonymity,
and subsequently, a greater propensity for gross violation of customer rights, including the right
to good quality and billing accuracy. This has led to many bad and sometimes completely
unacceptable QoE among users of some of these services.
It is worth noting that this category of customers are more likely to use mobile/wireless devices
as the primary access terminal. The QoS/QoE parameters of interest to this group of users
include:
 Low Internet Speeds (High contention ratios)

Whereas many customers may be satisfied with low bandwidth offerings from service
providers, this may not be true for long, given the increasing popularity of social
networking applications with ever increasing functionality, which will undoubtedly lead
to greater demand for bandwidth as multimedia applications abound in this arena.
 SMS delays (Store and forward as opposed to real-time
Texting for social as well as business purposes has gained popularity over the years.
There appears however to be an expectation that short message services are real time as
opposed to a store and forward service. Other than delays, non-delivery of messages for a
variety of reasons This has occasioned much misunderstanding between customers ad
service providers. The problem however stems from the apparent failure of many service
providers to state the standards they base the provision of their services on and as such
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may lead to poor quality of experience especially where such information is only
provided consequent to customer complaints rather than in advance.
 Billing integrity/accuracy
In view of the fact that many service providers in the continent do not generally provide
itemized bills as a standard offering for their prepaid services, customers often end up
thinking they are not charged accurately. This is more so where the prices are high
leading to rapid depletion of prepaid credit for the service. The common practice among
many service providers of charging exorbitant fees for itemized bills upon demand
contributes significantly to poor quality of experience among their customers.
 Dropped calls
As noted in this paper, mobile and other wireless devices constitute a large proportion of
the access terminals in use in many African countries. Where there is poor network
coverage, many calls (both voice and data) experience numerous call drops leading to
both poor QoS and QoE.
 Quality of terminal Equipment
The proliferation of many cottage ICT industries, especially in the Far East has led to an
exponential increase in substandard equipment in many African countries. This is
especially true for terminal equipment, but this could easily spread to include into growth
 Poor Call Centre/Care Centre call Response Rates
Several service providers across the African continent have put in place customer care
centres or call centres ostensibly to receive and deal with consumer complaints. Improper
dimensioning of such facilities often results in unacceptable delays, which ultimately lead
to poor QoS and QoE.
 Poor Voice Call Quality
Though this has not quite caught the attention of the customer in African countries, it is
expected to gain prominence in the near future as customers traverse many networks are
by chance are exposed to networks with differing voice quality. Service providers need to
adjust their service provision to accommodate multimedia services. The regulators should
also set-up mechanisms on how the standards for these services can be measured and
regulated.
Corporate Customer Expectations

Businesses on the other hand exhibit a higher demand for voice services as well as data/Internet,
which have mainly been delivered through fixed line systems principally for historical reasons,
rather than the appropriateness of the system. The ever-increasing mass of consumers accessing
networks via mobile and other wireless gadgets has gradually seen the integration of
mobile/wireless access interfaces into office communication systems, which are nevertheless still
hooked up to fixed line networks.
Texting for the business community has on the other hand been lower but is on the rise as texting
is increasingly deployed for the delivery of certain services. As many businesses go online, the
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need for reliable connectivity has become very critical both in terms of their ability to go online
for their informational requirements as well as the linking of corporate networks into WANs.
Some wireless communications deployments have in the recent past proved to be somewhat
unreliable especially during rainy seasons. The increasing availability of optic fibre cables may
go a long way in alleviating the challenges faced by corporate customers in this regard, provided
attractive pricing models are used by service providers.
The aging copper infrastructure and their attractiveness in certain countries to scrape dealers has
seriously hindered the provision of good QoS. Failure by many service providers to deploy their
cables to the right standards may have largely contributed to extensive cable vandalism. Unfair
business practices may also have contributed to the high levels of vandalism.
An analysis of complaints made by many corporate customers also points to the possibility of
some service providers not matching the claims they make through their public pronouncements
and thereby creating the much dissatisfaction among their customers.
Many corporate organizations are increasingly deploying or making use of various value added
services for payment and delivery of information to their clients. This makes QoS/QoE for
certain value added and premium content services an important factor for this category of
customers.
The QoS parameters that are of interest to this category of customers include:
 Network Congestion (Voice communications)
Many corporate customers use their voice links and services mainly for purposes of either
dealing with their suppliers or their clients. Congestion over voice links can therefore
have an extremely adverse effect on businesses and precipitate very poor QoE among
customers.
 Network/Service Availability
Many corporate customers are increasingly establishing and maintain a presence on the
world wide web as a means of reaching clients who are now capable of using e-
commerce solutions to purchase their goods and services. Many corporate customers are
also increasingly networking their offices or retail outlets or facilities. To this category of
customers, poor network availability can have serious operational as well as financial
impacts on them.
 Low Internet Speeds (High contention ratios)
In several African countries, service providers do not provide their customers with vital
information regarding the what to expect from shared Internet connections. In many
cases, customers are not even informed that the services are being provided on a shared
basis, until they lodge complaints regarding low speeds. The manner in which
advertisements are done in a number of markets also leaves a lot to be desired and tend to
either be confusing or out rightly misleading.
As with network availability, slow downloads of content and pages may occasion
corporate customers much loss in business since their customers may opt to purchase
from their competitors on account of low Internet speeds. Speed has become the greater
focus of the customer regarding data/Internet services.
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In many African countries, some operators have represented broadband speeds to be as
low as 64kbps as opposed to its definition in as a minimum of 3Mb/s in some developed
countries.
The presence of fibre-optic cables in some of the African countries has not made
significant impact in either the speeds or the reduction in cost of internet services. This is
attributed to the fact that cable operators need to recoup their investments. However, it
should be understood that the customer is not looking for free services but value for
money in terms of better quality.
 Voice Quality
The speech quality may not be a major issue for the customer as one will still be able to
communicate. However, all these parameters must meet a certain threshold of acceptable
standards.
Service providers must recognize that the satisfaction of a customer is dependent on how they
best meet certain minimum standards, which they must set, if these are not set by regulation.
Role of the Customer

The average/ordinary consumer of ICT services in Africa appears not to be sufficiently
knowledgeable with regard to ICTs. In order to reduce chances of being denied their rights and
purchasing inappropriate products and services, customers need to observe the following.
 Endeavour to be well-informed by reading all marketing materials provided by service
providers and seeking expert opinion from other sources other than the provider of the
service(s) sought, where possible.
 Make careful, well informed decisions, seeking to learn beforehand from existing users in
order to reduce chances of being misled.
 Seek whatever information may be available from regulators as a neutral source of
advisory information
Role of the Regulator

Recognizing that the customer’s main expectation is to receive a service that meets the expected
standards, Regulators in Africa should:
 Set certain minimum standards which are expected from a service provider to ensure that
acceptable standards are maintained even in the event of market failures. These standards,
commonly known as Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) address areas like voice, data
and more recently multimedia.
 Endeavour to inform consumers of their rights with regard to quality of service
 Protect the rights of consumers with regard to the quality of Service
 Encourage, and where necessary, compel service providers to adopt acceptable business
practices
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In the developing (African) countries, most regulators have put in place KPI’s for voice service
as a basic service. Not many, if any, have developed minimum standards for data and seriously
lacking are KPI’s for multimedia services. For voice services in Kenya, the KPI’s that have been
put in place, especially for mobile telephony, include; Completed Calls, Call set-up Success
Rate, Dropped Calls, Blocked Calls, Speech Quality (MOS, PESQ) and Call Set-up Time. Of all
the above, the customer is mostly concerned with the Completed Calls.
3. RECOMMENDATIONS
(i) Service providers should strive to provide high quality services everywhere and
additionally recognize that QOE has got an element of subjective judgment of what
the customer feels about service standards and should thus pay closer attention to
such qualitative considerations.
(ii) Service providers should develop a new culture of providing their customers with
sufficient information on the services they provide. Such information should include:-
a. minimum quality of service targets they set for themselves
b. Pricing information
c. Clear descriptions of the services, especially what is not apparent to the ordinary
user without sufficient technical knowhow
d. Customer helpline options & standards
(iii) Manufacturers should be pushed to come up with equipment capable of delivering
acceptable standards
(iv) African countries should now go beyond issues of availability to reliability
(v) Regulators in Africa should determine the most appropriate thresholds for broadband
in their markets, as this appears to elicit different meanings even within each market.

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CUSTOMER ISSUES – QOS/QOE AS A FUNCTION OF

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND RETENTION – A

SESSION 5 – [ (DAY 1)]

2. CUSTOMERS’ QUALITY OF SERVICE EXPECTATIONS

To accurately determine customer expectations, service providers must obviously understand

Individual users’ Expectations

 Low Internet Speeds (High contention ratios)

Corporate Customer Expectations

Role of the Customer

Role of the Regulator

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