The stakes are as great as the potential rewards in the booming marketplace for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Carriers have invested heavily to educate, convince and win VoIP customers, and those customers can prove awfully fickle if VoIP service fails to live up to their high expectations for voice services.

The situation has fostered eagerness among VoIP providers for finding effective ways to minimize churn and protect their investment in customer acquisition. For example, more and more carriers are integrating a combination of pre-production operational-readiness testing and ongoing, need-by-need data mining with their processes for VoIP service provisioning and delivery. In operational-readiness testing, the VoIP provider evaluates operational effectiveness and efficiency end-to-end across internal staff, integral vendors and business processes before service launch. Then, after launch, the provider performs data mining—in limited, tactical fashion, to achieve specific business objectives—to drive continual improvements in processes. Together, these two disciplines enable a VoIP provider to make critical enhancements across its range of “customer touch points”—preorder, ordering, provisioning, usage, billing and customer service.

Simultaneously improving customer satisfaction and illuminating operational inefficiencies, pre-production operational-readiness testing and tactical data mining deliver top- and bottom-line benefits that improve a carrier’s ability to meet its VoIP business goals.

The Cost of Acquiring Customers

“Are the calls as clear? … Do the calls always go through? … Will I receive all of my calls? … Are calls frequently dropped? … Is VoIP suitable for professional business communications? …”

Customers have proven understandably skeptical about VoIP, and service providers have been forced to invest heavily in addressing their concerns and warming customers to their product. When these costs for advertising, marketing and public relations campaigns are factored into the calculation, a VoIP provider’s cost of customer acquisition might range into the several hundreds of dollars per customer.

The truth is that VoIP, competing for bandwidth with other applications on the network, can prove susceptible to a lot of the poor performance attributes that the skeptical users fear. Weaned on the impeccable quality of the Synchronous Optical Network (SONET), circuit-based world and its guaranteed “five 9s” of service reliability, customers have had their expectations for voice services set high. Relatively common IP network issues such as packet delay, loss and jitter can quickly undermine all of the customer faith that a carrier’s good, lengthy efforts in advertising, marketing and public relations have established.

Performance issues aren’t the only reasons a customer might jump either back to traditional, land-line voice service or to another VoIP provider. Common, high-profile problems with installation or billing also can discourage a customer—and ultimately squander the VoIP provider’s cost of customer acquisition.

A Method for Keeping Them

Operational-readiness testing is a proven method for helping a VoIP provider keep its customers and achieve return on its considerable investment in acquiring them. The process can expose performance or operational issues before they are encountered by real customers, enabling the VoIP provider to cost-effectively eliminate the problems and ensure high customer satisfaction from the start of service provisioning.

Operational-readiness testing is different from standard enterprise testing—the litany of unit testing, string testing, system testing, integration testing, user-acceptance testing, stress-and-volume testing, 508-compliance testing, etc. that service providers normally utilize to determine whether the systems supporting a service offering are functional. Operational-readiness testing takes a broader assessment, to include both the individuals using the systems end to end and the business processes defined for them.

One of the most important operational-readiness tests in the context of VoIP service provisioning is customer-experience testing. At its best, customer-experience testing evaluates every customer touch point associated with the VoIP service. Before broad-scale introduction, services are ordered, implemented and used as the provider’s eventual customers will. The tests can yield important insights about the provider’s systems, personnel (internal staff and vendors) and business processes surrounding VoIP preorder, ordering, provisioning, usage, billing and customer service. The provider is enabled to make the necessary improvements to ensure that their customers’ transition to VoIP is as seamless as possible and that service performance matches or exceeds that of traditional voice services. A provider might learn, for example, whether its VoIP service is ready to deliver a consistent customer experience, regardless of whether calls are placed between VoIP and traditional wireline and wireless users or merely between VoIP users.

Other operational-readiness tests that a VoIP provider might find especially valuable include information assurance, independent validation and verification testing, access-control testing, business-process testing, field-operation tests, quality assurance, stress-and-load testing, security, penetration and alpha-customer tests. The key is to keep the tests tightly focused, to ensure that they delivered targeted, easily useful intelligence for making quick improvements to operations.

The Critical Period of Pre-Production

Operational-readiness tests are best performed in the period of service pre-production. This is because there are far-reaching benefits to exposing operational inefficiencies or performance problems early on—before service has become widely available, processes have been adopted end to end across operations and the cost of corrections has grown.

One reason for this is that the period of pre-production is, far and away, the most affordable time to isolate, diagnose and eliminate a problem. One carrier learned through pre-production operational-readiness testing that its process for managing Primary Interexchange Carrier/Customer Account Record Exchange (PIC/CARE) orders was flawed. Operational-readiness testing prevented the carrier from losing revenues associated with 80,000 PIC/CARE orders until, at the earliest, the next monthly billing cycle.

Another reason that pre-production is the right time to perform operational-readiness testing for VoIP is because customer satisfaction (or lack thereof) is such an integral factor in this marketplace’s high rate of customer churn. One service provider that is relying on customer-experience testing to evaluate ordering, provisioning and billing before extending its offering to a given market has managed to slash:

• order entry cycle time by 45 percent,
• errors by 50 percent and
• mean time for issue resolution by 40 percent.

How many customers might this provider have kept in the fold by making process improvements through pre-production operational-readiness testing?

Performing these tests before wide-scale service availability does not necessarily have to delay service launch. Operational-readiness rests can be performed in concurrence with the typical application and technology tests that a VoIP provider is likely to already be performing. For example, customer-experience testing specifically can commence at the same time as does coding. Even when methods and procedures are just under development, test scenarios can be mapped to requirements.

Tightening Vendor Management

With key infrastructure components so often outsourced to external providers in the VoIP industry, tight vendor management is critically important to ensuring a provider’s profitability. A VoIP provider’s service rollout, Quality of Service (QoS) and financial performance suffer when its third-party vendors’ processes are not in synch with its own. Vendors must be measured and managed, and handoffs among internal and/or external personnel must be clearly defined. Operational-readiness testing can illuminate costly inefficiencies in these vendor linkages. So can data mining.

Data mining does not have to be a tremendously complex undertaking. Yes, large-scale data warehousing is tedious, error-prone, expensive and time-consuming, but we’re not talking about large-scale data warehousing. A VoIP provider can take a narrow, tactical approach to data mining—and, along the way, gradually build a data warehouse in need-by-need fashion, to fuel long-term decision making about markets and opportunities.

The VoIP provider can identify its most important revenue and performance metrics and then implement simple reporting systems to track them. The tools needn’t be especially sophisticated. "Screen scraper" approaches that utilize macros, spiders or service application programming interfaces (APIs) can prove surprisingly valuable, for example, as one-dimensional data can often be most efficiently extracted from a system’ s user interface. If it’s important to know which users have been using which databases, audit logs and trace files can prove a good source of information—and easily turned into digestible business reports. And the best method for an executive-level audience of decision-makers might be commercial, off-the-shelf, business-automation software such as Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.

Tactical data mining brings to VoIP providers targeted intelligence to inform immediate enhancements to processes that plug revenue leaks, cut operational costs and/or boost customer satisfaction. Over the course of the service lifecycle, the VoIP provider will broaden testing and reporting to address new needs, and, need by need, the larger-scale data warehouse organically grows.

Conclusion

Pre-production operational-readiness testing helps ensure a positive experience for a VoIP customer from the start. Tactical data mining provides a framework for ensuring ongoing health of the VoIP service over its entire lifecycle. Both tactics are low-overhead activities that, when executed wisely, do not inject cycles into VoIP service launch and delivery. In fact, pre-production operational-readiness testing and tactical data mining can facilitate a more rapid launch. They give VoIP providers the confidence they need that their systems, people and processes underlying VoIP service provisioning are going to deliver the results they expect. Without them, a VoIP provider risks proliferating significant efficiencies across its internal/external operational environment and—even worse—its tremendous cost of hard-won customer acquisition.