TM Forum Management World took place in Orlando this past week, and Aricent took part in it in a variety of ways, including facilitating one of the “Intensive Debate” sessions. For ours we put forward a provocation to the participants: how can carriers and others in the telecom business apply lessons and strategies from improving Customer Experience Management (CEM) to the emerging field of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications?

M2M is growing very rapidly, with many billions of objects and devices expected to be connected together in some form in the coming few years. This includes everything from remote monitoring of people with chronic conditions living at home (so they donâÄôt have to spend time in expensive hospitals), to tracking and managing large quantities of trucks and equipment.

Carriers and network equipment providers need to understand the needs of the various industries deploying M2M solutions, as their needs can vary significantly in terms of stationary vs. mobile objects, bandwidth and latency requirements, cloud integration, and a host of other factors. A one-size-fits-all approach wonâÄôt work, and not acknowledging that will land carriers back in the bit-pipe conundrum.

Hence our question about applying CEM principles to M2M: are there lessons we can take from how CEM has evolved in recent years that will help make networks more responsive to the needs of M2M?

âÄúCustomer experienceâÄù covers a dizzying array of issues, so for the purposes of this session we focused on something under carriersâÄô control: network performance. Several transformations have taken place in how carriers think about CEM in relation to their networks:

1. Reactive to pro-active: Complaints from customers used to be the trigger for investigating network problems. Today carriers use smarter analysis to pre-emptively anticipate and head off problems before they occur.
2. Correlation to Causation: Carriers now have much better ways to close the loop between a reported issue and the problem that was causing it. Instead of just inferring that the issue has been solved, or inferring what the root cause was, this can now be accomplished with greater certainty.
3. Status Checks to Value Added: Instead of simple âÄúI am hereâÄù or âÄúAre you there?âÄù pings, richer data gets passed around the network that improves overall network and usage intelligence.
4. Looking Inward to Looking Outward: Carriers used to take a network-centric view, focusing on network performance and KPIs without looking outward so much to consider what actual customers were needing and perceiving. ThatâÄôs now changing.

We had a lively debate about how these changes could be applied to networks to help them be better optimized for various M2M applications. After an initial discussion we divided the participants up into three groups of mixed backgrounds who, with the help of some structured worksheets to keep things focused, brainstormed on three topics: healthcare remote monitoring, smart grid (such as smart meters), and fleet/facilities management. After working in groups we brought everyone back together to talk about some of the ideas they had generated. The conversation was stimulating and quite a few new ideas and approaches came out of it. Thanks to those who joined us for the session!