Customer Experience Management or CEM is a buzzword these days in mobile. While CEM has been applied across verticals such as financial services, transportation, food and beverage, it’s only recently that CEM has been applied in mobile.

With a growing gap between end-user expectation and carrier service delivery, coupled with eroding trust and customer ownership, the ideas behind CEM become highly relevant, as CEM tries to bridge that gap, giving them the tools necessary to empower them and take decisive actions, as they face increasing competition from over-the-top players.

ABI Research’s report categorizes CEM as an umbrella term that spans multiple domains across network and IT. CEM touches on areas as vast and diverse as customer care, subscriber data management, billing and charging, policy, device management, service assurance, network analytics, and network operations.

The report sizes the CEM opportunity in 2013 at $1.3 billion across the network and IT domains, although roughly 80% of the market is dominated by the IT domain in areas like BSS/OSS, CRM, and SDP.

Aditya Kaul, practice director comments, “The Mobile CEM landscape today is dominated by IT vendors such as HP, Amdocs, and IBM which are leveraging strengths in IT combined with a heavy focus on customer analytics and data mining. However, for CEM to succeed, the network piece including network monitoring, optimization, DPI and policy, has to go hand-in-hand with the IT piece, which is where traditional network vendors come in.” Kaul adds, “Ultimately, CEM only becomes relevant if done end-to-end, with a single point of ownership within the carrier; something like a NASA mission control with a CEM commander at its helm, having multiple views across Network and IT domains.”

These findings are part of ABI Research’s report, ‘Customer Experience Management in Mobile Networks – Role of BSS/OSS, Network Monitoring, and Analytics’ and are included in the Next Generation Optimization, DPI & Policy (http://www.abiresearch.com/research/service/next-generation-optimization-dpi-policy/) and Managed Services (http://www.abiresearch.com/research/service/managed-services/) Research Services.

ABI Research provides in-depth analysis and quantitative forecasting of trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies. From offices in North America, Europe and Asia, ABI Research’s worldwide team of experts advises thousands of decision makers through 70+ research and advisory services. Est.1990. For more information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.