Are telco services and SLAs no longer relevant?

I wonder if we’re reaching the point where “telecommunication services” is no longer a relevant term? By association, SLAs are also a bust. But what are they replaced by?

A telecommunication service used to effectively be the allocation of a carrier’s resources for use by a specific customer. Now? Well, less so

  1. Service consumption channel alternatives are increasing, from TV and radio; to PC, to mobile, to tablet, to YouTube, to Insta, to Facebook, to a million others.
    Consumption sources are even more prolific.
  2. Customer contact channel alternatives are also increasing, from contact centres; to IVR, to online, to mobile apps, to Twitter, etc.
  3. A service bundle often utilises third-party components, some of which are “off-net”
  4. Virtualisation is increasingly abstracting services from specific resources. They’re now loosely coupled with resource pools and rely on high availability / elasticity to ensure customer service continuity. Not only that, but those resource pools might extend beyond the carrier’s direct control and out to cloud provider infrastructure

The growing variant-tree is taking the concept beyond the reach of “customer services” and evolves to become “customer experiences.”

The elements that made up a customer service in the past tended to fall within the locus of control of a telco and its OSS. The modern customer experience extends far beyond the control of any one company or its OSS. An SLA – Service Level Agreement – only pertains to the sub-set of an experience that can be measured by the OSS. We can aspire to offer an ELA – Experience Level Agreement – because we don’t have the mechanisms by which to measure or manage the entire experience yet.

The metrics that matter most for telcos today tend to revolve around customer experience (eg NPS). But aside from customer surveys, ratings and derived / contrived metrics, we don’t have electronic customer experience measurements.

Customer services are dead; Long live the customer experiences king… if only we can invent a way to measure the whole scope of what makes up customer experiences.

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