TORONTO – Although they were hard pressed to admit it, cable operators at Wednesday’s SCTE Canadian Summit acknowledged that customer complaints to their call centres are often the best measurement of the quality of digital service being provided by their networks.
It isn’t that these cable ops are lacking network monitoring platforms, or don’t use the resultant diagnostic data to address problems detected by those tools. The bigger issue is that many of the existing measurement and diagnostic tools on the market tell only part of the story, said the speakers who took part in a panel discussion on digital quality issues.
Michel Lapointe, senior analyst for the digital video technologies development group at Videotron, said that many digital signal quality problems simply cannot be measured automatically by current analysis tools. He cited a number of digital quality problems, such as audio phase reversal, audio channel misplacement, total audio distortion, video field reversal, and what he called “annoying macroblocking”.
“I’m not talking about major macroblocking, where a customer calls to say they have a problem, it’s automatically diagnosed as an RF problem, a truck is sent out, and the day after it’s fixed,” Lapointe said. “I’m talking about customers saying, ‘I see a crappy picture.’ You can’t measure that. Not yet.”
Lapointe said that he is often amazed when he reviews call centre reports and sees only two customer calls logged for a problem that must have affected several hundred people.
“I had 700 people who had a bad experience (watching a video-on-demand signal), and this creates the kind of background noise that ‘cable is crappy’ and ‘it would be better to rent a DVD’,” Lapointe continued. “So we had only two people calling, and I could kiss these guys. I welcome these calls. Please call, guys, and tell me if you see something wrong.”
Lapointe added: “As of now, the test equipment I’m using – and this will stay within these walls here, right? – the test equipment I end up having to use is the customer call. That’s not good.”
Mark Shinozaki, director of network quality assurance for Rogers Communications, said one of the challenges faced by his organization is the inability to define network metrics that are truly representative of the customer experience.
“Our belief is that by focusing in on our customer experience in our day-to-day activities, it would have a significant impact in terms of return on investment,” Shinozaki said.
To that end, Shinozaki’s network quality assurance group spends time looking at customer-facing metrics generated by its call centre to determine where problems are occurring in the network.
“However you get the information to understand the key problems that your customers are having – whether it’s call volumes, anecdotal information, someone who can replicate the problem, whatever – focusing on network-related initiatives to try to resolve some of these key issues that are affecting your customers has tremendous value in terms of that data,” Shinozaki continued. “And that’s primarily what we’ve been focused on in the last couple of years.”
Speaking on behalf of Cogeco Cable, digital cable engineer Stephen Shaw said he recommends that all cable operators implement a network-wide monitoring platform for digital services, something Cogeco has had in place since 2008.
“If you’re not using a monitoring platform currently, then go out and get one, because you have no idea what’s happening (in your network) without a solid monitoring platform,” Shaw said. “You need to monitor this stuff. You need to have the tools to get at data to really understand what’s going on in your networks…It pays for itself probably in the first two months.”
However, even with diagnostic data available to help troubleshoot digital quality problems in the network, many cable operators and digital video service providers still end up having to do their own detective work.
“There are times when I feel a little bit like Columbo,” said Dave Higgins, vice-president of quality assurance for Comcast Media Center, in reference to the fictional detective of TV fame. “You get the phone call and you’re like a detective. You get these problems that just go on and on and on for weeks, and in some cases, months.
“Truthfully, the tools that exist today tell you part of the story. They point you in a direction sometimes, and you have to really dig down, to try to figure out why all of a sudden, for example, closed captioning isn’t working on a single channel in three markets,” Higgins continued.
Returning to the issue of improving the quality of experience for digital subscribers, Higgins added: “If you use the lens of your customer to measure the levels of your service quality, you can’t go wrong. As one of my colleagues said, if your customer says, ‘This is crappy,’ I think you know what that means. The overall customer quality of experience is the true end game that we in this room need to measure.”
