◆Using Big Data to Improve Customer Experience and

Business Performance
Jeffrey Spiess, Yves T’Joens, Raluca Dragnea, Peter Spencer, and
Laurent Philippart

In an environment where communications service providers (CSPs)

increasingly have the same service offers and devices, offering a superior
customer experience is a priority to compete. Solutions that have the ability
to highlight what really matters in driving customer satisfaction and deliver
actionable insights from their wide-reaching customer, network, and service
data are key differentiators for CSPs. This paper explores ways of integrating
big data insights with automated and assisted processes related to key
customer touchpoints to ultimately improve the customer experience. We
show how innovation from Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs helps CSPs improve
their business performance, using unique methodology designed to select
the right key quality indicators, build accurate key business objective
“formula,” predict customer behavior, and ultimately understand which
factors are influencing the most. This can be used for example to improve
the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The net result is a happier customer and a
higher customer value. © 2014 Alcatel-Lucent.

The Customer Experience (3G/4G) smartphones and over-the-top applications.

Communications service providers (CSPs) are
facing fierce competition as they strive to win con-
sumer and enterprise business with their fixed and
mobile services. Intense economic pressures, escalat-
ing consumer demands, and increasingly complex
technologies are raising the stakes, forcing service
providers to work harder than ever to attract custom-
ers and keep them happy.
CSPs can keep customers on board and spur long-
term success by putting more focus on improving the
overall customer experience. The previous areas of
competitive differentiation such as faster bandwidth,
unique services, and device innovation have largely
disappeared with the advent of fast broadband, multi-
play services, third generation/fourth generation
Customer experience remains one key differentiator,
when you consider that network reliability, coverage,
care, provisioning, and billing all have an impact on
the customer’s perception of their service provider.
Measuring Customer Experience
In order to improve customer experience, service
providers must first be able to effectively measure
and model customer experience. This means that ser-
vice providers must also understand what matters
most to their customers. Finally they need to make
the necessary targeted investments and actions to
optimize customer experience.
Although they hold vast amounts of data about
their network and subscribers, CSPs are not effectively

Bell Labs Technical Journal 18(4), 3–17 (2014) © 2014 Alcatel-Lucent. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/bltj.21642
 Panel 1. Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Terms
3G—Third generation
4G—Fourth generation
ACSI—American Customer Satisfaction
Institute
ARPU—Average revenue per user
BSS—Business support system
CAPEX—Capital expenditure
CDN—Call processing data node
CEM—Customer experience management
CES—Customer effort score
CLV—Customer lifetime value
CSP—Communications service provider
DSL—Digital subscriber line
managing it today. Challenges exist in the fact that
customer data is “owned” by separate departments,
which exist as disengaged silos in the traditional tele-
com organizations [18]. Each organization has a par-
tial view of its own customer touchpoints, but lacks a
structure in which to piece together the entire end-to-
end customer view across all of the customers’ touch-
points with the CSP. Furthermore, the sheer vastness
of customer-centric data that exists across the organi-
zation creates technical challenges in getting to the
bottom line: what is driving customer experience?
A market segment has emerged for customer experi-
ence management (CEM) analytics tools which prom-
ise to help solve these technical challenges and also to
overcome organizational barriers [10, 11, 14].
A good example of a specific measure of cus-
tomer experience that is becoming widely used by
CSPs today is the Net Promoter Score (NPS*) [16].
NPS is a customer advocacy metric used to rate how
likely customers are to recommend the product or
service. NPS is measured directly and subject to per-
ception biases and environmental factors. A strong
motivation and business case exists for leveraging
available customer-centric event data from across the
different customer touchpoints in order to create an
objective measure of customer experience.
Big Data to the Rescue
Today CSPs manage their businesses using oper-
ations support systems/business support systems
4 Bell Labs Technical Journal DOI: 10.1002/bltj
IT—Information technology
KBO—Key business objective
KPI—Key performance indicator
KQI—Key quality indicator
NPS—Net Promoter Score
OLAP—Online analytical processing
OLTP—Online transactional processing
OPEX—Operational expenditures
OSS—Operations support system
QoE—Quality of experience
RoI—Return on investment
SLA—Service level agreement
SNA—Social network analysis
(OSS/BSS) reliant on traditional database, data ware-
house, and business intelligence tool sets. These tech-
nologies are typically applied to the data in each
organizational silo, and are configured to create
reports and dashboards aimed at solving the business
problems of the individual organizations. As the tradi-
tional tools are not scalable and cost effective for very
large data sets, very often customer-centric data is left
unanalyzed. Data from multiple organizations in the
CSP are not correlated. New technologies designed to
handle data on a massive scale have emerged with the
buzzword label “big data” technology.
Measuring CSP customer experience holistically is
fundamentally a “big data” problem, and to be effec-
tive, CEM analytics tools must incorporate big data
technology. Gartner defines big data as having three
attributes: high volume, high velocity, and high variety
[5, 9]. High volume means that there is a growing
quantity of data. This is manifested in the exponential
growth of broadband data traffic, which generates
multiple billions of customer event records per day in
large CSPs. High velocity indicates an acceleration
in the speed of data, such as the need to detect customer
issues in real time to avoid service issues. High variety
refers to the increase in the types of data, which for the
CSP brings new challenges for managing data related to
application usage, web browsing, and social media.
Big data results in data sets that are so large and
complex that it becomes difficult for traditional
databases and business intelligence software to process.
A number of new technologies have emerged which
work to solve the challenge of big data. A big data solu-
tion for CEM needs to incorporate these technologies.
To solve the high volume challenge, new data
management technologies such as Apache Hadoop*
[3], NoSQL databases such as Apache Cassandra*
[2], and next-generation column-oriented data
warehouses have been introduced. Hadoop and
NoSQL technologies like Cassandra achieve scalabil-
ity by adding more and more server clusters (hori-
zontal scalability) which process the large data sets in
parallel. Column-oriented data warehouses achieve
scalability by organizing the data by columns in the
relational database, rather than rows, which is much
more efficient for aggregation calculations over many
rows but with a limited set of columns. This allows
parallel access to data across many hard drives rather
than sequential access across a single drive.
The high velocity challenge needs to be addressed
in several ways. First, as customer-centric data is
generated, it needs to be rapidly stored. The new data
management technologies outlined above each have
their own mechanisms to accomplish massive fast
storage, leveraging their parallel architectures.
Customer-centric data must also be processed rapidly
from the data store. Apache Cassandra provides real
time data access, and is very effective in processing
data on a per-customer basis. Another technology
known as streaming analytics (also known as event
stream processing), is used to process customer-
centric data “on the fly” without the need for long-
term storage. Streaming analytics technology is used
to detect preset conditions and to trigger actions in
real time. For example, streaming analytics can be
used to detect when a mobile subscriber has experi-
enced three dropped calls in the past hour—and can
issue a trigger to a person or an automated system to
take action on behalf of that subscriber.
The high variety challenge can be solved by com-
bining the same technologies in a solution architec-
ture that leverages the technology strengths to make
sense of the data. Apache Hadoop is useful for storing
and processing vast quantities of structured, semi-
structured, and unstructured data. Domain-specific
advanced analytics algorithms can also help to derive
useful insights and correlation of the high variety
data. For example text and speech sentiment analysis
of unstructured call center transaction logs provides
insights into the customer’s care experience.
What Really Matters to the CSP
Service providers are in business to maximize
profit and value to their shareholders. In the end it is
the money that really matters. However, in order to
grow and maintain a successful profitable business,
CSPs need to attract and retain customers that are
willing to pay for the products and services they
receive. As markets for communications services
have become hyper-competitive, CSPs have been
faced with the choice of either competing on price or
putting more and more focus on customer experi-
ence as a way to differentiate and build profitability.
Service providers can enhance profitability by
improving the lifetime value of customers. This can
be done with direct actions (such as price increases),
or can be achieved indirectly by managing key busi-
ness objectives (KBOs) that have an impact on cost
and revenue. For example, if a service provider focuses
on improving network quality, this can lead to
decreased customer retention costs and increased
usage revenue. However this is offset by the costs
required for network capital expenditures (CAPEX)
and operational expenditures (OPEX) in order to
achieve the higher level of network quality. It is a
complex business problem and these complexities
lead to risks; how does the CSP ensure the CAPEX is
spent optimally? Is there a level of quality that achieves
the best profitability without over-engineering?
Service providers have begun to focus on under-
standing and optimizing their customers’ experience
as this has been shown to be a better way to drive up
profitability [17]. By focusing on KBOs that are
related to the end customer experience, CSPs are able
to direct their investments towards improving that
experience. By taking a holistic approach and consid-
ering the entire customer experience, rather than
just the network experience or the care experience,
CSPs can prioritize their spending to tackle the big-
gest pain points facing their customers. This has
DOI: 10.1002/bltj Bell Labs Technical Journal 5
benefits in creating satisfied customers which on
average spend more and cost less, with higher cus-
tomer lifetime value (CLV).
Customer Centric Management
Ensuring that a CSP’s approach to improving
customer experience is appropriate and structured
first requires an understanding of the primary ele-
ments that constitute customer experience. There
are three areas for a CSP to consider in delivering the
customer experience:
• The customers and what motivates them,
• The customer perception of products and ser-
vices and their relative importance, and
• The market context within which a CSP finds
itself.
The work of Frederick Herzberg [6], Noriaki Kano
[8] and the American Customer Satisfaction Institute
(ACSI) [12] provide some appropriate frameworks
for understanding these components. Herzberg’s
research, while focused on a worker’s motivation to
do his job, revealed a fundamental structure for indi-
vidual motivation where factors affecting motivation
were either creators of dissatisfaction when perceived
as inadequate but not necessarily motivating beyond
being perceived as acceptable (hygiene factors), or
factors whose presence generated motivation in the
individual (motivating factors).
Noriako Kano’s study and model shows a similar
structure for the relationship between customers and
products or services where the absence of essential or
“must-have” characteristics create dissatisfaction and
optional or “nice-to-have” characteristics drive satis-
faction.
The ACSI’s consistent measurement over time
provides a consistent and methodologically sound
proxy for customer experience both within and
across market segments within defined geographies
and markets.
The implications of these foundations are that
customer experience measurement could be catego-
rized and focused on three key areas:
• Driving behavior to eliminate a perceived defi-
ciency in hygiene factors by focusing on reducing
6 Bell Labs Technical Journal DOI: 10.1002/bltj
customer effort—whether in the form of solving
customer problems on first contact (first call res-
olution), ensuring customer effort scores (CES)
are low for key touchpoints, or by being proac-
tive with customers to reduce any need at all for
the customer to expend effort,
• Removing potential sources of customer dissatis-
faction and increasing trust through continuous
improvement—for CSPs this means ensuring
networks, services, and operations are meeting
their customers functional needs by working
flawlessly, and
• Identifying the motivating factors for customers,
leveraging that knowledge to create moments of
memory or delight and, thus, to generate advo-
cacy which can be as simple as a positive retail
experience and small random acts of kindness as
a matter of policy in the care cycle, or as complex
as a seamless multichannel purchase experience.
The quest to create sustainable competitive
advantage using customer experience can be summa-
rized as shown in Figure 1.
While the means and modes of interactions
between people and organizations have changed, the
people and cultures they are part of evolve much
more slowly. The understanding of what drives
human choices as well as their relationships with
products and services are the essential foundations
for looking at customer experience in a meaningful
way. Today customers interact with CSPs in a multi-
tude of ways. These sequences of interactions, or
customer journeys, together form the customer life-
cycle: starting with learning about the provider’s
brand, products, and services; deciding to make a
purchase; using products or services; paying for
them, and at times even having to deal with cus-
tomer support. The form of this customer lifecycle is
often itself a concatenation of different cycles
between stages of the overall lifecycle.
For example, the traditional decision making pro-
cess for an intended new purchase is influenced by
factors that alter the decision journey [4]. Change in
the consumer decision journey from the traditional
funnel model (where the consumer considers
 Create irrational
loyalty
Build trust

Remove NPS
customer pain
• Single question
advocacy net-net
Process improvement score drives towards
operational metrics improvement and
• Continuous process and irrational loyalty
CES performance optimization
• Single question VoC
drives towards
optimization of rational
experience for
customer care

CES—Customer effort score

NPS—Net Promoter Score
VoC—Voice of customer

Figure 1.
Creating sustainable competitive advantage.

a number of brands, evaluates them, and makes a Customer Lifecycle

decision to buy followed by focus on the use of
a product and service) to a more iterative approach
where the consider/evaluate/buy loop is sometimes
replaced by the loyalty loop (enjoy/advocate/bond).
This occurs when loyalty to the brand is no longer
rational. Therefore, when the consumers’ bond with
a brand is strong enough, they go directly into repur-
chase without cycling through the earlier decision-
journey stages.
Structuring the approach to improving the cus-
tomer experience requires building a bridge between
the lifecycle as seen by the customer and its reflec-
tion in the CSP. It means creating an end-to-end
framework that allows an aggregate as well as a
detailed view of the customer experience at a given
point in time at multiple levels of granularity with
different frames of reference according to the observ-
er’s span of control. This is a non-trivial task as we
will show below.
The customer lifecycle includes a comprehensive
set of phases shown in Figure 2 that start with aware-
ness (user’s perception of the brand), continue with
interact (forming a value perception of products and ser-
vices offered and their prices) and are followed by agree/
get (making the decision to acquire a product or ser-
vice). The next phase in the customer lifecycle is con-
sume which covers the “in-service” experience, followed
by support which covers the customer care and payment
experience where the simplicity and accessibility of the
payment interaction is very desirable. The last two
phases are the reward phase where the CSP offers loy-
alty programs, promotions, and special offers and leave
which represents the end of the customer lifecycle.
Any given customer is less likely to go through
the different phases in sequential order than to follow
their own particular journey. For example a customer
sees an ad (awareness), goes online and researches
the CSP offers (interact) after which he leaves the

DOI: 10.1002/bltj Bell Labs Technical Journal 7

 1 2 3 4
Awareness Interact Agree/Get Consume
Figure 2.
Customer lifecycle.
1 2 3 4
Market/ Fulfill Manage
Acquire
Sell Order Customer
Figure 3.
Communications service provider (CSP) lifecycle.
portal and goes to a shop where he continues the
research (again interact) and decides to purchase
the product or service (agree). The customer then
requests delivery to the home (get). The customer
journey generates “events” along the way, induced
by the customer interaction with the provider.
CSP Lifecycle
The CSP lifecycle is a reflection of the customer
lifecycle and represents the CSP journey with each
and every customer. Alcatel-Lucent brings to these
constructs a unique contribution on providing struc-
tured linkage between the customer lifecycle, the
CSP lifecycle, and the primary business tool that
CSPs use to deliver their services.
The CSP lifecycle follows, as illustrated in Figure 3,
the customer lifecycle. It starts with acquire, contin-
ues with market/sell, followed by fulfill order and man-
age customer. The next phase is service assurance
followed by charge/bill, retain/optimize, and in the end,
retire. In reality, an example of the CSP journey is not
a complete list of CSP lifecycle phases but rather a
fragmented set of interactions. The customer journey
8 Bell Labs Technical Journal DOI: 10.1002/bltj
5 6 7 8
Support Pay Reward Leave
5 6 7 8
Service Charge Retain
Retire
Assurance Bill Optimize
we looked at in the previous section is reflected in a
CSP journey where the CSP sees the interaction
interrupted on the portal (market/sell) and after a
while, sees a person in the shop. The lack of integra-
tion between systems doesn’t allow for a single view
of the customer. CSPs would benefit from a customer-
centric data model together with a higher level sys-
tem integration. This would allow the service
provider journey to generate “events” in network
BSS/OSS, capture process, and network usage activ-
ity and accompany the customer through the life-
cycle as required.
Bridging the Two Lifecycles: How We Measure the
Quality of Experience
The CSP needs to be able to measure and quantify
customer experience across all the phases of the cus-
tomer journey and, if expectations are being met,
areas which require improvement and areas in which
things are going well. Alcatel-Lucent proposes a model
that defines a holistic view of the quality of experience
(QoE) by identifying the key drivers of customer satis-
faction across the entire journey. A large component
of the QoE is related to the “in-service” experience
(or the consume phase) which is connected to the qual-
ity of the services and devices used. Often the CSPs
focus only on network quality, which is only one part
of the quality puzzle, and do not consider other attri-
butes such as the quality of the service used, the per-
formance of the device, or its physical design, feature
set, and ease of operation. The next significant part of
the holistic QoE is care which covers the support
experience. Care is linked to the categories of prob-
lems that affect the customer experience and the cost
associated with these key drivers. Perception is the
next QoE component and it maps the awareness,
interact, and reward phases of the customer lifecycle
to the holistic QoE. This includes the brand image—
the perception of the value the CSP offers, the loyalty
programs, and promotions. The remaining customer
journey phases of agree/get and pay are part of the
ease component of QoE. The key drivers of customer
satisfaction related to ease are the billing experience
and to a lesser degree the activation experience,
since there is much more interaction with customers
in the pay touchpoint.
The CSP requires an aggregate view of the QoE
as well as the view from an individual customer.
Depending on the customer’s profile, key drivers to
their customer satisfaction could be different. For
example a teenager in a family of cell phone users
may be sensitive to the quality of the mobile messag-
ing service (e.g., text transmission failures and late
text message notifications) while a parent is sensitive
to the quality of the mobile voice service (e.g.,
dropped calls and audio issues) as well as the ease of
using the billing system.
The aggregate view allows the CSP to monitor
status across all customers as well as by customer
segment. For example, the CSP might want to iden-
tify high value customers to ensure that they enjoy a
very high QoE. The CSP would also want to monitor
trends in churn propensity and proactively target
retention campaigns towards this customer segment.
Drilling Down to What Really Matters to the Customer
The holistic QoE view described in the previous
section provides a construct that covers all phases of the
customer journey with the flexibility of aligning the
weighting of the QoE drivers to the CSP’s unique pro-
file and target and the importance of categories of
problems that affect the customer experience. The
QoE at the top level should be aligned to the CSP’s
key business objectives (KBOs). These KBOs are in
turn calculated from the key quality indicators (KQIs)
and the lower level key performance indicators
(KPIs) that drive the KBOs. The holistic QoE approach
illustrates how big data is used to improve customer
experience and loyalty. It allows the CSP to identify
what really matters to the end customer. It provides
a comprehensive framework that allows the CSP to
select the right KPIs, KQIs, and KBOs based on the
key drivers to customer satisfaction for an individual
customer, a particular customer segment, or across
all customers. Figure 4 shows the holistic QoE in a
hierarchy of indicators represented by a pyramid.
The four sides of the pyramid are the key QoE com-
ponents: quality, care, perception and ease. A CSP
doesn’t need hundreds of KPIs, only the right KPIs
and KQIs to measure and improve customer satisfac-
tion. Further, an initial selection of metrics is not
valid indefinitely. As we explore in the next section,
in a changing environment it is necessary to refine
the key drivers behind the QoE using KBO calibra-
tion and feedback loops.
Actionable Insights
“Never measure unless you want to record,
never record unless you want to analyze, and never
analyze unless you want to take action.” This is a
conventional wisdom that stands the test of time.
Presently, although the data that is available comes
in more vast amounts, turning it into real informa-
tion still requires a touch of art above science.
In today’s digital networks, the volume of event
data is immense, but what kind of insights are CSPs
looking for in this data? At large, there are two classes
of analytics: descriptive and predictive.
Descriptive analytics encompass all information
that describes the status or history of the system or
process under investigation. Such descriptive analyt-
ics can provide the investigator with insights they are
required to act upon. Under descriptive analytics we
DOI: 10.1002/bltj Bell Labs Technical Journal 9
 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Awareness Interact Agree/Get Consume Support Pay Reward Leave

ty
KBO ali
Qu

Ca
re
KQI

se
ion

Ea
pt
rce
Pe

KPI

KBO—Key business objective

KPI—Key performance indicator
KQI—Key quality indicator

Figure 4.
Customer quality of experience.

find root cause analysis and diagnostics. Diagnostics
may involve both the passive reading and interpreta-
tion of data, as well as actively triggering particular
actions on the system under test and reading out the
results. Root cause analysis is a more elaborate pro-
cess of iterative digging into data, and correlating
various insights such as to determine the one or mul-
tiple fundamental causes of an event. Descriptive
analytics, although starting from deterministic mea-
surements, often result in root cause identification
subject to statistic boundaries. For instance, monitor-
ing line state information on a Digital Subscriber Line
(DSL) over a period of time may reveal that the root
cause of increased bit error rates can be traced to loop
unbalances or bridged taps or missing splitters.
Figure 5 shows a system where root cause analysis is
determined subject to Bayesian probability models
[7, 15]. Many more such probability models exist.
Predictive analytics take analytics a step further.
Under predictive analytics, data is used to seek to
derive a future state of the system under test, hence
to allow for anticipative action. An example here
would be determination of customers’ propensity to
churn, by correlating behavior over a period of time

10 Bell Labs Technical Journal DOI: 10.1002/bltj

 Attenuation
55

50

45
OK
40

35

30 NOK Bayesian network

25 Symptom
20
analysis
15

10
Degree
5

22.00 00.00 02.00 04.00 06.00 00.00 10.00 12.00 14.00 16.00 18.00 20.00
Time

Attanution US (3 min) Attanution DS (3 min) Line down

Faiture Collector down

Downstream bit rate

1000
950 OK
900
850
800
750
700 Symptom NOK
650
600 analysis
550
500
450
400
350 Degree
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
22.00 00.00 02.00 04.00 06.00 00.00 10.00 12.00 14.00 16.00 18.00 20.00
Time

Actual bitrats DS (3 min) Attainable bitrats DS (3 min)

ATM traffic DS (5 min) Line down Faiture
Collector down

Data acquisition Extraction of Probabilistic Conclusion

from network significant events reasoning
NOK—Not OK OK—Okay

DOI: 10.1002/bltj
Figure 5.
Line quality diagnosis using Bayesian probability models.

Bell Labs Technical Journal

11
with network event data such as usage records and
fault indicators.
While analytics may come in various forms, as
stated, the end goal is to influence the system under
test to correct anomalies, or to further optimize its
function, changing its behavior. In this paper we
concentrate on those actions that ultimately influ-
ence the customer experience.
Different types of analytics may be leveraged for
use cases such as reactive and proactive care. In reac-
tive care, the CSP intervenes and seeks to correct an
anomaly at the time the end user has signaled the
degradation or failure of a service. At that point,
the elapsed time between the identification of the
issue and the actual resolution is key. Although this
includes a long chain of sequential steps, the root
cause analysis in many cases determines the resolu-
tion time. In call centers, time is costly, and long wait
times may further deteriorate the end-user experi-
ence. This creates a need for real time or near-real
time analysis mechanisms.
As for proactive care, the CSP seeks to intervene
in the system to anticipate issues and/or to improve on
the overall customer experience. Here too, one may
seek to influence the behavior of an end user (e.g.,
offering free communication time), the end-user ter-
minal (pushing firmware updates proactively to cor-
rect known deficiencies), the network (e.g., changing
power levels for mobile terminal communication), or
CSP processes (e.g., eliminating a redundant step in a
customer workflow). In the next sections we exam-
ine these target systems in further detail.
Earlier we established that the portion of QoE
related to the “in-service” experience is connected to
the quality of the services and devices used. The end
terminal is by far the most visible personalization of
the service in the hands of the end user. End user
terminals are always a combination of hardware,
software, and customer-specific settings, and are typ-
ically prone to changes made by the user, either
intentionally or unintentionally. Given that the CSP
doesn’t have physical access to the device, having the
capability to remotely perform telemetry and system
changes is key to influence the behavior of the end
terminals, hence the high importance of remote
12 Bell Labs Technical Journal DOI: 10.1002/bltj
device management and remote control in today’s
digital services industry.
The second significant driver for the quality com-
ponent of the QoE is the quality of the service, deter-
mined by the network infrastructure, inclusive of
communication and application logic. The network
infrastructure must serve the needs of many custom-
ers at the same time, and hence the challenge exists
to find a configuration that optimizes the service
offering to many end users. Even more important is
ensuring that addressing one customer’s issue doesn’t
result in deteriorated service for other customers. As
such, policy control and its impact on optimizing cus-
tomer experience is emerging as a key capability.
This is again where big data analytic capabilities can
“come to the rescue” by influencing network policies
in such a way as to optimize the overall customer
experience and economies for the CSP.
Complementary to the network infrastructure,
business processes play an important role in the
overall perceived customer experience. Business
processes that interact with end users can largely be
identified as either self-service or assisted-service ori-
ented. Both are implemented by business process
logic, which are sometimes called workflows, by
which either the end user or a customer service rep-
resentative is guided through a number of steps
interacting with the system.
Business processes have more of a hygiene func-
tion in that process anomalies, or missed opportuni-
ties for automation have detrimental effects on the
customer experience. By measuring interaction
times, and logging events while those processes are
being executed, today’s business process systems can
reveal anomalies like steps that are too complex
(exemplified by humans pushing the back button),
processes that routinely break down before comple-
tion, or processes that are restarted too often.
Identifying the actions associated with end users,
their terminals, and the CSP’s physical assets and
processes is not a unique and one-time activity.
Advanced CSPs are leveraging big data capabilities
and analytic tools to create a continuous feedback
operation whereby action, measurement, analysis,
and updated action are repeated on a very frequent
basis. Advanced CSPs deploy systems that change
workflows on a daily basis, leveraging the learning
experience, even creating target testing groups in
real time to watch and learn differences about how
end-users are interacting with the systems. Modern
customer experience management solutions should
then also allow those modifications to occur in an
agile way in very frequent steps, rather than being
limited by information technology (IT) release cycles.
Where to Focus?
Another key aspect of transforming data into
insights, and insights into actions, is selecting the
customer experience use cases that yield the highest
financial return for the service provider—those that
make immediate business sense or are considered
business critical—and starting with the most simple
to articulate with the most demonstrated value.
According to a Gartner study [13], an average
CSP could potentially generate $10 per subscriber
per year in additional margin when using analytics to
turn customer data into insights and subsequently
into actions. Six use cases account for 55 percent of
the total revenue and cost savings:
• Churn propensity scoring. Uses customer, network,
usage, and support data to identify key churn driv-
ers and predict the likelihood to churn. Combining
churn propensity with the customer lifetime
value allows prioritizing corrective actions on
churn drivers. This is further described in the
next section.
• Improved self-service. Provide customers with the abil-
ity to diagnose or even control their services from a
self-care application. Improved self-service includes
proactive alerting, enhanced root cause analysis,
decision support/recommendation through multi-
ple channels, and consistency with assisted care.
• Customer segmentation. Segment customers based
on usage patterns, value, customer experience,
demographics, or other criteria to improve mar-
keting, customer understanding, and targeting.
Used in acquisition, cross-sell/upsell and cus-
tomer retention campaigns.
• Best next offer. Propose personalized offers based on
usage, billing, and other customer data analysis.
• Pre-pay recharge. Real time offers to encourage
prepaid customers to recharge their account,
depending on their balance.
• Tracking dissatisfied customers. Identify dissatisfied
customers based on explicit feedback (customer
contact), indirect feedback (forum, social media)
or inferred feedback (usage trends, predicted
QoE) and proactively fix issues or propose attrac-
tive offers at the next customer contact.
Other high-value use cases include:
• Tracking video experience. Monitor customer expe-
rience when using multi-screen video, identify
root cause, and optimize video delivery across
the network from the source to the end-user
device through dynamic line management,
admission control, prioritization, efficient cach-
ing, and network/call processing data node
(CDN) selection.
• Predict network outages. Predict network outages
by analyzing customer complaints and network
data, and dynamically adjusting network policies
to prevent failure.
• Track devices with high data usage. Identify devices
with high data usage to enable efficient quality
of service planning and best fair-usage policy, or
optimized tariff plans.
• Tracking data experience. Monitor mobile data cus-
tomer experience at the application layer rather
than the network layer and proactively fix qual-
ity or configuration issues, or propose devices
and tariff plans best adapted to customer usage
patterns.
• Improved assisted care. Use analytics to improve the
efficiency and value of assisted customer care
workflows. Use outage prediction to avoid or
deflect calls. Use customer troubleshooting data to
avoid chronic calls. Monitor customer experience
to proactively fix issues and avoid calls. Provide
consistent customer care across multiple channels.
• Tracking of enterprise customers. Monitor and report
service level agreements (SLAs) for enterprise
customers, identify changes in behavior/usage
patterns for improved marketing, cross-sell/upsell,
and retention.
DOI: 10.1002/bltj Bell Labs Technical Journal 13
Churn and Customer Lifetime Value
Bell Labs worked with a range of partners to
build an analytics foundation based on developing
analytic patterns for QoE, propensity to churn, and
lifetime value. This innovative work combines social
network analysis (SNA) and other social factors with
more traditional metrics and applies machine-learning
methods to compute the propensity to churn for
individual users. Bell Labs algorithms serve as the
foundation for proprietary predictive analytics mod-
els which help CSPs use customer data to identify the
best opportunities to maximize revenue.
Use cases based on churn propensity scoring are
at the top of Gartner’s list for potentially generating
additional margin when using analytics to turn cus-
tomer data into insights and actions. Churn predic-
tion algorithms foretell the likelihood of a given
customer to leave a CSP within a given period.
Understanding which customers are at risk of churn
helps the service provider to better target customer
retention campaigns, resulting in a higher success
rate to retain existing customers. By leveraging data
from network and non-network data sources, ana-
lytics provides insights that promote a better under-
standing of how service usage and behavioral
patterns influence churn. This results in actionable
intelligence on key drivers of churn, supporting new
retention offers that target the root causes of cus-
tomer dissatisfaction.
Customer lifetime value (CLV) prediction algo-
rithms foretell the profitability of a given customer
over their service lifetime and enable CSPs to identify
valuable customer segments to be used in acquisition,
cross-sell/upsell, and customer retention campaigns.
CLV algorithms help CSPs use customer data to iden-
tify the best opportunities to maximize revenue. By
making incremental investments to improve CLV, a
CSP can improve overall company business perfor-
mance and corporate valuation. The concept of CLV
can help improve customer segmentation. By build-
ing a customer segmentation model around clusters
of CLV, a marketing team can focus on retaining and
growing high-CLV segments, rather than focusing on
subscriber groups that generate high average revenue
14 Bell Labs Technical Journal DOI: 10.1002/bltj
per user (ARPU) but may offer lower profitability or
loyalty. Up-selling and cross-selling campaigns are
designed to move subscribers to higher-value CLV
segments by increasing the spending of loyal custom-
ers. Loyalty campaigns are designed to move sub-
scribers to higher-value CLV segments by increasing
their service lifetime. CLV allows network operations
departments to prioritize the resolution of network
performance issues based on their impact to high-
value customers. Over time, a CLV-based segmenta-
tion approach can help increase the proportion of
customers in higher-value segments.
Addressing the Inhibitors to the Usage of Big Data
In a recent study [1], the top three barriers to
implementing customer experience management
were difficulty in securing cross-organizational co-
operation, poor understanding of the benefits of
improving CEM, and poor data quality.
To pave the way for a successful CEM strategy to
manage customer experience, service providers must
empower an executive who is charged with creating
an enterprise-wide CEM strategy. This executive
must control or influence the budget for CEM tools.
With this top-down leadership, the CSP is able to
optimize its investment in big data to benefit the
entire customer experience. Silo projects and barriers
to data sharing are minimized. Service providers
have begun to make this change and are appointing
customer experience officers and others in similar
roles; however in many large organizations the silos
are deep rooted, and require a strong management
focus to overcome. In some countries, market regu-
lations also create silos by separating service provider
operations into separate businesses such as whole-
sale, retail, or infrastructure. A successful CEM strat-
egy also needs to consider these constraints.
Service providers have begun to develop data
management strategies that look to consolidate cus-
tomer data across multiple organizations or across
the entire enterprise. Software tools for data quality
assurance, data integration, and master data man-
agement are used to create a single trusted view of
customer-centric data [18]. The immediate benefit
of this approach is that it maintains “one version of
the truth,” so that separate transactional systems and
applications are working with a consistent view of
each customer’s data. Many benefits stem from a
sound telco data management strategy. Dirty data
can be avoided. Once a common repository of cus-
tomer data is available, it can be leveraged by busi-
ness analytics to serve the needs of multiple
stakeholder organizations.
Data management and consolidation of telco
data has often been approached using enhanced sub-
scriber data management products for online transac-
tional processing (OLTP), and traditional data
warehousing solutions for online analytical process-
ing (OLAP). However, these standard approaches do
not scale to manage the vast scale of customer-centric
telco data, and CSPs have begun to adopt big data
technology as a cornerstone in their data manage-
ment strategies.
It is often helpful for the CSP to bring an external
consultant on board to serve as a trusted advisor to
guide in planning the right strategies for data man-
agement, CEM, and business analytics. The consul-
tant assesses the current state of the CSP versus its
peers in both local markets and across the globe, and
identifies key gaps in achieving the priority business
goals.
Consultants should be engaged during the entire
lifecycle of a CEM transformation project. In the
planning phases, the consultant helps with analysis
and benchmarking prior to building the strategy and
business case. In the implementation phase, consul-
tants help to define the architecture. Following
deployment, consultants can help by ensuring that
each organization is achieving the maximum busi-
ness value from the newly available tools.
Technical consultants can help a CSP to design
the optimum data management and analytics archi-
tecture which incorporates big data technology.
Business consultants that are focused on customer
experience can aid the CSP in understanding where
to make priority investments that have the highest
return on investment (RoI). Often it is difficult for a
CSP to understand the business case behind
improvements in customer experience, which can
become a barrier for CEM transformation projects.
The business consultant helps to estimate cost savings
from reduced customer churn or more efficient cus-
tomer care, and revenue increases from increased
personalization and more accurate targeted market-
ing campaigns.
Conclusion
The paper has described how innovation from
Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs helps CSPs improve
their business performance using a unique method-
ology designed to select the right key quality indica-
tors, build accurate key business objective “formula,”
predict customer behavior, and ultimately under-
stand which factors are influencing the most. Alcatel-
Lucent provides structured linkage between the
customer lifecycle, the CSP lifecycle, and the primary
business tool that CSPs use to deliver their services.
As service providers advance in their implemen-
tation of CEM strategies, the direct result will be a
more personalized experience for telecommunica-
tions customers. With actionable insights and a 360
degree view of each customer’s behavior, issues, and
desires, the CSP provides a better experience by
enabling a positive perception of their company cou-
pled with quality, customer care, and ease of doing
business that satisfies or delights them. Further
research in this area must focus on enabling that pre-
cise personalization that maximizes customer satis-
faction together with customer profitability.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the fol-
lowing members of the Customer Experience
Solutions Department for their contribution to this
work: David Stevenson, Hilary Mine, Ann Marie
Vega, Rhodo Odysseos, and Geeta Chauhan.
*Trademarks
Apache, Apache Cassandra, and Apache Hadoop are
registered trademarks of The Apache Software
Foundation.
Net Promoter Score is a trademark and NPS is a regis-
tered trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain &
Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
DOI: 10.1002/bltj Bell Labs Technical Journal 15
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(Manuscript approved October 2013)
JEFFREY SPIESS is director, product management in
Alcatel-Lucent’s Networks and Platforms
group in Plano, Texas. He is currently
managing the Motive Analytics product line
for customer experience analytics and care
analytics. Since joining Alcatel-Lucent in
1997, he has held numerous positions
managing carrier applications, including software
development, systems engineering, product and
solution management, product and field marketing,
strategy, solutions architecture and consulting. He
holds three patents in telecommunications technology.
Prior to joining Alcatel-Lucent, Mr. Spiess was
employed with Texas Instruments where he designed
hardware and software systems for defense and
telecom applications. He holds a bachelor of science
degree in electrical engineering from the University of
Cincinnati, Ohio, and a master of science degree in
computer science engineering from the University of
Texas at Arlington.
YVES T’JOENS is the vice president and head of Product
Development, Customer Experience
Solutions in the Alcatel-Lucent Platforms
group in Antwerp, Belgium. Prior to that,
he served as chief technology officer for
Alcatel-Lucent’s Access Network Division
and as manager of the company’s Digital Home Care
business. He is the author of multiple papers, holds
multiple patents, and has actively contributed to the
standardization of access networking.
RALUCA DRAGNEA is director, product management in
the Alcatel-Lucent Platforms group in
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is currently is
responsible for a suite of content
management products, an integral part of
customer experience management
solutions. She has extensive experience in
senior technical and management roles within the
communications industry. In her previous role she was
responsible for strategy and incubating new solutions
with a focus on customer experience analytics,
optimization, security and cloud computing. Prior to
that she was the founder and general manager of the
Web Services Alcatel-Lucent Venture which was
successfully acquired by the Enterprise Product Group
in 2008. She has served as a Bell Labs research project
leader, and has also held director positions in Alcatel-
Lucent R&D groups responsible for bringing to market
leading products in Internet Protocol (IP), Multiprotocol
Label Switching (MPLS), and Asynchronous Transfer Mode
(ATM). Previously she was the principal architect and she
founded groups responsible for developing and
introducing to market several new and innovative
Newbridge/Alcatel-Lucent products such as 5620
Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP)
Network Management System, 5520 Element
Management System and 5660 Network Design System.
Ms. Dragnea has a master’s degree in electrical
engineering from the University Politehnica of
Bucharest, Romania. She has authored or co-authored
14 papers and holds two patents.
LAURENT PHILIPPART is director of the Motive Analytics
program in Alcatel-Lucent’s Networks and
Platforms Group. This program encompasses
the Alcatel-Lucent Data Management
Platform and associated Analytics Templates
for fixed, mobile, and cable service
providers. Mr. Philippart has over 20 years
experience in OSS service assurance and he holds a
telecommunications engineering degree from the
École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de
Bretagne in France and a master of science in satellite
communications and spacecraft technology from the
University College London in the United Kingdom.
From 2006 to 2012 he led the TeleManagement Forum
Service Level Agreement Management project and
served as editor of the Forum’s IPTV Application Note.
He has been involved in a number of large projects,
including consulting and implementation for
performance and service quality management systems
for service providers worldwide and has specialized in
voice and audio/video quality assessment for IP-based
services. ◆

PETER SPENCER is vice president, Customer Experience

Strategy at Alcatel-Lucent. In this role he
leads engagements devoted to helping
Alcatel-Lucent’s customers improve their
own customers’ experience. He has worked
in the communications and information
technology (IT) field for more than 22 years, during
which time he has held executive roles with Alcatel-
Lucent and Ogilvy & Mather. He has a broad
understanding of economics and technologies across
fixed, mobile, and all service types (voice, video and
data). Mr. Spencer’s experience includes customer
experience management and measurement; market
research and operational marketing; brand strategy
and communications management; sales and channel
management, including partner program design and
implementation.

DOI: 10.1002/bltj Bell Labs Technical Journal 17