Part 2 - Engineers Make The Best Data Scientists!

So don’t miss out on an opportunity to accelerate your career and revolutionize the way you think about your network and customer service quality.

Why now? It’s time to change the way you see your network – from the outside in

A tsunami of data is already on its way to CPE engineering, driven by unprecedented demands on customer service quality management. Similar waves have already transformed sectors like retail, financial services, marketing and advertising, and media. The world is never going back.

Axiros believes the time has come for CPE data to cast off its perception as the ‘poor cousin’ to core network data and take on a central role within telco service quality management. As engineers, we may know this data, we may master its complexities, but do we believe its potential has ever been truly recognised, let alone realised?

The truth is that operators are sitting on an under-utilised treasure trove of CPE data. Each customer gateway can provide hundreds of parameters detailing its activity, its performance, and that of the devices connected to it. This incredibly rich data can be captured continuously via your ACS, and the amazing power of AI now allows customer experience to be comprehensively understood, monitored, and managed as never before.

Other industries could only dream of access to such an amazingly informative, minute-by-minute understanding of their customers. Those that do - ‘digital natives’ like Amazon and Google - make use of every bit of customer data, yet telcos have typically ignored the detailed picture of their customers that’s hidden in plain sight.

For the first time, network operators could see their whole network from the vantage point where it matters most - the customer perspective, understanding in detail every leaf of their network ‘tree’, not just its trunk and branches.

In the hands of skilled engineers aided by sophisticated AI algorithms, this richly complex web of data could be analysed to give an incredibly nuanced and granular understanding of every single customer’s service experience, over time and compared to others.

The potential for transforming service quality management is enormous, encompassing quality monitoring, assisted service call responses, trend identification and proactive maintenance, ultimately right through to zero-touch customer service. AXWIFI, for example, already incorporates algorithms which constantly monitor WiFi quality and optimise channel selection across an entire CPE fleet, based on predicted behaviour of the environment, and optimised for the competing needs of ‘friendly’ gateways in the same network.

As CPE engineers, how could we fail to see and be excited by this vision of fundamental improvement? How could we ignore this potential, and our key role in realising it?

It’s easy to get started!

If you’re looking to build familiarity with analytics and your base understanding of machine learning, then it’s easy and cheap (often free) to get skilled-up through on-line courses from global education platforms like Coursera (www.coursera.org) and EdX (www.edx.org), or specialist sites like www.Kaggle.com . In fact Coursera was founded on a machine learning course which is still one of its best and most popular. They offer a wide range of options covering the basics of data analytics, programming languages (Python or R), visualisation tools, machine learning and even advanced topics like neural networks.

You can get a flavour for what’s possible with CPE data just by playing with some of the dashboards and tools already offered in AXTRACT. And once you’re ready to get into some bespoke analysis, AXTRACT provides easy interface (API) connections to get access to your data and start exploring it on your own system.

And of course, data analytics and AI are not new for network operators, in fact telecoms companies have been among the pioneers of these technologies worldwide. Most have already built large-scale, often cloud-based, data infrastructure and established analytics teams with expertise in AI and ML.

So you can probably tap into a pool of established expertise in-house, and in the process help them to become aware of the potential in the CPE domain.

Continue the conversation with Axiros

Our world, the world of customer devices and their management, will soon be all about data. As engineers, we need to be at the forefront of this revolution, we can’t afford to get left behind. We need to be the ones in the driving seat, showing our organisations how important CPE engineering can really be.

Analytics and AI is more than just a great career move, it’s stimulating, exciting, and important for the future your organisation. Now’s the perfect time to get involved. What have you got to lose?

Axiros can help. We pride ourselves, not just on being the leading producer of ACS systems, but also on our commitment to help our clients to get the most from them. Like you, we understand CPE engineering in depth, but we’re also familiar with the technical complexities of AI and the challenges of innovation. Our analytics advisors can help guide your organisation through the pitfalls and offer valuable insights where you’re less experienced.

Contact us, and we’ll be happy to share experiences in CPE analytics and discuss the possibilities in your organisation.

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