Vitria's Chris Menier and Cognizant's Tiran Dagan Explore How Digital Operations and AIOps Help NSPs Create Customer-Centric IT Ecosystems

In an ongoing effort to identify the metrics that matter for improving customer engagement, companies must leverage the latest technologies to monitor and measure the key elements that affect the user experience.

In an audio interview for journalists covering Mobile World Congress 2019 in LA on October 22-24, Tiran Dagan, Chief Digital Officer for Media and Communications for Cognizant, and Chris Menier, Vice President and Transformation Strategist for Vitria, discuss how Digital Operations and Artificial Intelligence supported operations (AIOps) can enable network service providers (NSPs) to improve the experience of their subscriber bases by mining data to gain better insights from operational activities.

"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," explains Menier.

As consumer expectations rise along with the array of services that depend on high-quality connectivity, network service providers must move away from the tried and true performance measures and look to capabilities such as AIOps and Digital Operations to offer a fuller picture of how operations affect the customer experience.

"By embracing these new technologies, NSPs will change the dynamics of their relationship with customers. Cable or telco companies are no longer just a network or infrastructure operator. They are critical partners for enterprises pursuing digital streams of revenues and consumers looking for new exciting experiences. NSPs are not just technology providers anymore; they are business generators. That means they need to speak the language that matters to enterprises and consumers," says Dagan.

Cultural Transformation

To address this new dynamic, NSPs need to develop a new cultural perspective that builds on strong technical culture and adds a customer-centric focus that can be shared within and between organizations.

"For cable and telco companies, it's one thing to point out that there is an alarm on one part of the network infrastructure that needs to be fixed. It's another to anticipate problems in the network and understand the impact it has on revenue generating operations to properly plan and prioritize the proactive action. It's about being predictive, and making dynamic changes before failure occurs," says Dagan.

Digital Operations and AIOps offer NSPs an opportunity to become more proactive by converting data analytics into intelligent insights.

"The key is to make the cultural shift that revolves around the customer experience -- or value-driven operations," explains Menier. "Currently many organizations still remain in silos. Forward-thinking organizations, however, are bringing on executives -- like Chief Experience Officers and Chief Customer Officers -- who can provide an integrated perspective on how the different elements of operations contribute to the overall picture."

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, that requires many different people in many different roles and disciplines to monitor, track and respond to ongoing developments.

"That is why it is so important to have low-code solutions that do not require a lot of programming expertise. If we are going to get sales, manufacturing, marketing and IT teams to coordinate, they need access to tools and managed services that can be easily used and shared on a daily basis," explains Menier.

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 and to bring different stakeholders on the same page consistently. When combined with the services we offer at Cognizant, NSPs have an opportunity to quickly operationalize key use cases and projects by leveraging our highly skilled and experienced teams while integrating other critical technologies into the initiative," says Dagan.

(For more information visit: http://www.vitria.com)