Huawei: A key Leader in CEM standards development

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Huawei has become a leading player in standardizing key aspects of Customer Experience Management. In April 2013, competing against other industry members, Huawei was selected by the TM Forum to lead an industry collaborative effort to develop a common set of customer experience metrics.

Huawei began by developing a new metric framework based upon the TM Forum customer experience lifecycle. Using this framework, metrics were defined to cover all aspects of an end-user’s interaction with a service provider; from first awareness, through purchase and use, and on to renewal and recommendation.

The first version of the document, known formally as GB962 Addendum A Customer Experience Management Lifecycle Metrics, was published in Q4 2013. The initial document contained 450 metrics covering the entire customer experience lifecycle, many assessable on a per-user basis, together with additional metrics specific to B2B scenarios. The document, which is freely available to all TM Forum members, has provided service providers world-wide with a standardized set of metrics with which to measure customer experience from the end-user’s outside-in perspective. For many service providers, these metrics have formed the basis for designing and delivering improved customer experience.

Huawei has continued to update and refine the document, leading up to the latest version, recently published by TM Forum, which consists of 531 metrics. 80% of these metrics are technology agnostic, with 20% specifically related to mobile broadband service performance. Moving forwards, Huawei is planning to expand the document with metrics specific to fixed-line services. In addition, Huawei is actively working with the QuEST Forum, leveraging the TM Forum CEM metrics with QuEST’s strong benchmarking capability to create standardized industry CEM benchmarks. Once completed, this will allow service providers to easily compare their CEM performance with industry benchmarks.

New for 2015, Huawei has proposed and will lead a TM Forum project to quantify the business benefit of CEM to service providers. The objective is to aid service providers with their CEM investment decisions by creating an accurate, industry-validated, financial model of the value of CEM use cases. This will reduce the element of “faith” required when investing in CEM, allowing quantitative comparison of differing