Page 351 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

3-142 CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

(e.g., a corporate account), or across an entire service. It may be applied where one operator is retailing
another operator’s wholesale service (e.g., Mobile Virtual Network Operators).
If QoS applications measure the actual level of service being offered, SLA management applications
(Contract Management) provide the ability to compare actual QoS with the level of service promised.
This is particularly important where service-level guarantees (SLGs) have been contractually offered—the
primary purpose of the SLA management application(s) is to ensure that the operator knows at any time
which services to which customers may potentially or actually be in breach of a service-level guarantee.
Principal functions of this application area are:
• Measure Perceived QoS: Measure or estimate the actual quality of service being received by the
customer against preset thresholds.
• Manage QoS/SLA Violation: Ensure that the customer and the relevant internal processes are
informed of service quality degradations and violations and that action is undertaken to resolve
the degradation or violation.
• Manage Reporting: Report on the customer’s QoS performance, manage the production and pre-
sentation of reports, and prepare reports for internal processes and respond to specific inquiries
on the performance of the customer service.

3.6.3.8 Customer Self-Service, Customer Self-Management
This process is part of the FAB end-to end (vertical) process and the CRM (horizontal) process group
as well.
Customer self-management provides an Internet technology–driven interface to the customer that
allows the customer to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. It interacts
with the customer to provide fully automated service or assisted service over various customer touch
points. Although customer self-management primarily triggers functionality defined in the rest of the
CRM, Service Management and Resource Management applications, they should also contain function-
ality specific to customer self-empowerment.
Customer self-management generally provides a comprehensive collection of self-service functional-
ity supporting all stages of the customer lifecycle, registration and fulfillment, assurance and billing
management activities. As the various features provided for customer lifecycle management are often
portlet type applications that are integrated to a CSP’s overall customer self-management portal, the
self-management functions can be broken down into three major subfunctions:
• Customer self-empowered fulfillment
• Customer self-empowered assurance
• Customer self-empowered billing

New business realities require self-service systems to support the following criteria:
• One-and-done fulfillment across the service portfolio
• Multidisciplinary customer service (customer service/account problem resolution)
• Syncronized multichannel interoperability
• Total convergent self-directed billing (view/pay/dispute all)
• Reconciliation interoperability
• Personalization and usability
• Visualization of SLAs across subscribed services (cf. Customer Service/Account Problem resolution)
• Portfolio–driven guided selling (Product Catalogue, Product Lifecycle Management)
• Leveraging the 360-degree customer view (Customer Information Management)
• Customer self-management applications enable service providers to increase profitability across
the organization. These operations expect to gain more customer loyalty, service stickiness, and
average revenue per user (ARPU) for the service provider.