Real-time visibility on B2B services and SLAs develops customer transparency and trust

When enterprises compare service providers’ network services, they no longer compare only in terms of Gbps, Mbps, or milliseconds. They want the ability to instantly check how their network is doing, get a real-time view of site availability, verify service provider SLAs, immediately respond to employee and customer trouble tickets, and fix emerging problems before end users even notice. The network service provider capable of delivering that granular, proactive and real-time visibility from a self-service portal has a better shot at winning their business than rivals that can’t.

As an example, an EMEA service provider is working with their enterprise customers to define premium services supported by strict performance SLAs. The service provider needs to be able to prove that the service is meeting the defined performance targets and for the evidence of this to be transparently available to their enterprise customers.

Another example is Zain Kuwait, a mobile operator serving over 50 million consumers and business customers across seven Middle East and Africa countries. Zain Kuwait’s portal lets their enterprise customers view their own custom dashboards to visualize their network and VPN service performance and look at user experience metrics that are most important to their business.

For those providers leveraging multi-vendor SD-WAN technology, reporting, visualization and analytics of the underlay and overlay are important. It is also desirable to correlate third-party metrics from the SD-WAN orchestrators or CPEs to show related underlay and overlay KPIs from the different vendors, the underlying network, and other data important to each end user. It is this combined dataset and the powerful analytical features that deliver unrivaled insights for each end-user persona.

B2B self-service portals are rapidly becoming a standard requirement in RFPs

An end-customer portal capability is also becoming a standard requirement and is no longer a ‘nice to have’ in requests for proposal (RFPs) to service providers. A tailored customer portal also enables end customers to become self-serving in terms of self-diagnosing network and service issues. This creates an OpEx-saving benefit of reducing support costs, trouble tickets, and call center interactions for the provider.

For years, many service providers have recognized the competitive and bottom-line benefits of offering enterprise customer portals, yet they never launched them. That’s because for even a Tier 1 provider, it’s prohibitively complex and expensive to develop the underlying tools in-house. They also couldn’t simply buy an off-the-shelf ‘customer portal as a service’ solution because vendors found it equally daunting and cost-prohibitive to transform their traditional monolithic on-premise reporting and management tools to support a multi-tenanted, cloud-based portal, while also gaining new capabilities.

Customer portals need specific technical capabilities to deliver transparency and savings

Customer portals need to come equipped with specific technical capabilities to be relevant for both the service provider and enterprise customer’s needs. There are now some software vendors responding to these needs and coming to market with cloud-native designs for scalability and reliability, full role-based access control for data integrity and security, and multi-vendor support for ubiquitous adoption in target networks. The possibility for the service provider to customize aspects of the portal design, branding, and packaging are essential attributes.

Built-in machine learning technology can often facilitate predictive analysis of metrics such as bandwidth utilization. This capability also allows proactive alerting and notifications of potential service degradation, which is based on deviation from normal baseline behavior for selected metrics and KPIs.

Ideally, service providers can use the same platform as that used to deliver the end-user portal for their own internal cross-departmental purposes. This is the ultimate goal - one platform that serves the needs of the internal service provider teams and those of the end-customer portal users. This is a double-win for the service provider - one investment to boost their internal efficiencies and drive down OpEX, whilst also differentiating their services towards their end-customers, and creating upsell opportunities.

Is your B2B portfolio ready?