The power of ‘End-Customer Portals’

Is your B2B portfolio ready?

Service providers that differentiate B2B network services, beyond static service level agreements (SLAs) and basic vanilla reporting, benefit from winning against the competition and being able to upsell end-customer portal features with customized reporting and analytics.

When enterprises compare service providers’ speeds, they no longer measure it only in 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, real-time visibility from a self-service portal has a better shot at winning their business than rivals that can’t. 

End-customer portal visibility for the network provider and B2B customer 

Call it “End-Customer Portals”. One 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 MPLS layer 3 service performance and alerts. That enables the customer to focus on the network and service performance and user experience metrics that are most important to their business. For multi-vendor SD-WAN reporting visualization and analytics, third-party metrics can be ingested to show related KPIs from different SD-WAN vendors, the underlying network, and other data important to each end user. It is this combined dataset and the powerful analytical features supported by the platform that deliver unrivaled insights for each end-user persona.

In the process, end-customer portals also enable those enterprises to provide better service to their end-customers and maximize employee productivity by catching network problems before they escalate. This directly benefits sales revenue, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and more — all examples of why savvy service providers such as Zain Kuwait consider end-customer portals to be a must-have for their success in the enterprise market. The ability to gain full network visibility and deep insight into what’s happening with services on the network lets Zain proactively act on the quality of experience issues. In addition, introducing automation to support simpler, lower-cost deployment and proactive performance alerts provides additional benefits for Zain and their B2B customers. 

In fact, self-service portals are rapidly becoming a standard requirement in enterprise RFPs. Since Zain’s B2B customers also require this type of granular visibility, Zain collaborated with Cisco and Accedian to meet this need for its business customers by offering them this service through a customer portal. 

Why end-customer portals were so hard – until now

Zain Kuwait’s end-customer portals leverage Accedian Skylight’s integration with Cisco’s Crosswork Network Automation platform, a combination of exceptional carrier-grade service assurance, network visibility and customer portal functionality coupled with best-in-class automation and SDN control capabilities. Together, the combined solution provides a path to a feature-rich intent-based assurance.

Skylight with Cisco Crosswork offers a multi-tenanted, highly scalable, customizable end-user portal to B2B customers. A big advantage is that the same platform can be used by the service provider’s in-house teams for SP network visibility and proactive performance monitoring of network and service quality using Skylight sensors along with selected third-party datasets ingested into the platform.

In addition to serving as a powerful market differentiator, end-customer portals and the underlying service assurance layer also help Zain Kuwait improve multiple internal processes, helping to reduce overhead costs and thus maximize profits.

One way is by enabling enterprise customers to self-diagnose network and service issues — tasks that traditionally required the service provider’s involvement. This significantly reduces operating expenses such as maintaining a large contact center to field customer inquiries, plus a network team to investigate and resolve trouble tickets. 

Multi-tenanted, cloud-native and customizable 

For years, many service providers have recognized the competitive and bottom-line benefits of offering end-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 end-customer portal solution because vendors found it equally daunting and cost-prohibitive to transform their traditional on-premise reporting and management tools to support a multi-tenanted, cloud-based portal.

Accedian and Cisco eliminated those barriers by developing an integrated solution that was purpose-built and based on future-proof cloud-native technology.

Check our interactive end-customer portal demo here.