Chris Menier, Vice President and Transformation Strategist, Vitria

and Tiran Dagan, Chief Digital Officer for Media and Communications, Cognizant

In an ongoing effort to identify the metrics that matter for improving customer experience, network service providers (NSPs) must leverage the latest technologies to analyze the key signals that describe the user experience. As this imperative becomes more acute, Digital Operations and Artificial Intelligence supported operations (AIOps) can enable NSPs to improve the experience of their subscriber bases by correlating data to gain better insights from operational activities.

AIOps refers to the integration of AI and ML technologies into IT operations. Moving beyond traditional monitoring tools, wide-scope AIOps make it possible to analyze large volumes of data from multiple systems to enable large-scale automation of workflows across multiple layers of the service delivery ecosystem.

The combination of Digital Operations and AIOps enables network service providers to refocus operations around customer experience and other critical business metrics — such as revenue generation — instead of focusing only on the traditional IT metrics of speeds, feeds, uptime and availability.

By embracing these new technologies, NSPs will change the dynamics of their relationship with customers. This is important because cable and telco companies are no longer just a network or infrastructure operator. They have emerged as critical partners for enterprises pursuing digital streams of revenue and consumers looking for new exciting experiences.

Cultural Transformation

To address this new dynamic, NSPs need to develop a new cultural perspective that builds on the strong technical culture and adds a customer-centric focus that can be shared within and between organizations. This, in turn, requires systems that report on more than the performance of discrete elements of the network. It requires a broader impact analysis.

Most NSPs have solid systems in place for reporting on any given element of the network infrastructure. What is required today, however, is the ability to anticipate problems in the network and understand the impact that potential disruptions can have on revenue-generating operations. This makes it possible to proactively plan and prioritize actions by being predictive and making dynamic changes before failure occurs.

This is no small challenge. Especially since, currently, most organizational structures and systems still remain in silos.

As forward-thinking NSPs bring on executives — like Chief Experience Officers and Chief Customer Officers — who provide an integrated organizational perspective on how different operations contribute to the overall picture of service delivery, Digital Operations and AIOps offer operators an opportunity to convert data analytics into intelligent insights that can be acted upon.

Path Forward

The key to elevating and maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction is to constantly have a finger on the pulse of emerging expectations and current experiences. Given the complexity of most large operations, this requires many different people in many different roles and disciplines to monitor, track and respond to ongoing developments. In short, the innovation is shifting directly to the business and product owners.

That is why it is so important to have agile solutions, like a low-code platform, that do not require a lot of programming expertise. In order to get sales, operations, marketing and IT teams to coordinate, they will need access to tools and managed services that can be easily used and shared across disciplines on a daily basis.

That is why Vitria and Cognizant offer such a compelling joint value proposition.

Vitria’s AIOps platform, VIA, along with its Digital Operations templates enable projects to get launched rapidly to immediately get different stakeholders on the same page. When combined with the professional services offered by Cognizant, NSPs have an opportunity to quickly operationalize key use cases and projects by leveraging highly skilled and experienced teams, while integrating other critical technologies to accomplish mission-critical customer engagement objectives.

To listen to a comprehensive audio interview with Tiran Dagan and Chris Menier on the topic of Digital Operations and AIOps please visit: https://bit.ly/2mqtFr6