Building Trust with Customers

Trust may seem like an unusual word to use when discussing the relationship with your communications service provider. But trust is a vital part of a business relationship. If I am going to spend my money with a business, I trust that their products and services will do what they say they will, that they are priced reasonably, and that they will take care of me as a customer, otherwise, why am I spending my money with them?

We trust that our device will have connectivity to the network especially when we want it. We trust that the network will perform. And, we trust that all of the services we utilize will deliver a good user experience.

There are those special times, family events, a get together at a friend’s house, rock concerts, sporting events and so on, where you want to share your experiences and use your mobile device to do so. If you attended a Trump event in Washington or the Super Bowl in Houston recently, you probably spent a lot of money to be there to experience the moment, and you shared those special moments with your friends and family with a phone call, messaging, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or other social media engagement.

All of the big mobile service providers, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile augmented their facilities (https://www.ecnmag.com/blog/2017/01/carriers-prep-big-day-dc-trump-inauguration-approaches) at the Presidential inauguration to accommodate the expected flood of mobile traffic. They upgraded radio access facilities, adding temporary specialized (multi-beam and tilt) antennas, brought in mobile remote radio heads (Super Cells) and work crews, and continuously monitored the utilization and performance of their networks.

The stakes are simply too big for service providers to have poor network service at these high-profile events with over a hundred thousand people locally at the venues and many millions watching live on TV and on-line with video streaming applications. And, with the lightning speed and viral spread of bad experiences via social media a service provider’s brand and image can take a severe public relations hit.

NETSCOUT worked with our customers to help them prepare for Super Bowl LI in Houston, February 5, 2017 as our support team for Verizon Wireless participated in a trial run last month. Like our Support team’s efforts at last year’s Super Bowl L, and at other large venue events, including both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, they configured and tested InfiniStreams, Iris, nGeniusONE and TrueCall to recognize all of the new and temporary mobile gear installed around NRG stadium in Houston, and set up special dashboards in nGeniusONE; creating “communities” to monitor, customized service monitors for key applications and services, and more.

All of this preparation helps to make our customers ready for these large scale events by bringing visibility to their networks, applications and devices, insights to the consumption of network resources and services, and user behavior, and just as importantly, secures the network from cyber threats. In this way our NETSCOUT solutions help the communications service providers create and maintain to garner trust with their customers.