Dependability as a Service: The Key to a Positive User Experience

For more than 100 years, variations on the motto “the customer is always right” have driven the way in which businesses approach the people who buy their products and use their services. And although the word “always” might seem too strong at times, we can at least acknowledge that providing a consistently positive customer experience is a key driver to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat business. Furthermore, while the “customer experience” defines the overall experience with a company or brand, the “user experience” (or “UX”) is specifically focused on the end-user’s interaction with a product or service. In recent months we’ve seen a trend develop where our service-provider customers are acknowledging that a positive and consistent user experience goes beyond characteristics such as an application’s visual design or the ease-of-use of a service or a low network ping time. Instead, a superior user experience is a combination of delivering a solution that accurately addresses a user’s needs and doing it consistently. These service providers adopted our AgileCore UX trunking solution because they have factored in dependability as a crucial part of the user experience. Dependability of service is key for all users regardless of location or application or usage. If a service isn’t available when the end-user needs it, the rest probably won’t matter. And while trunking is usually considered to be part of the way-behind-the-scenes network infrastructure, it’s a component that underlies all those applications and services and end-to-end solutions. What’s notable is that more service providers are specifically considering the impact of their choice in a trunking solution on their ability to deliver better services, improve the user experience, and drive their business forward. These service providers all have access to alternative trunking services, including those that claim lower latency is the key to a better experience. Yet they’ve decided that latency isn’t the sole way – or even the best way – to measure customer satisfaction. More important than that is the performance and reliability driven by thoughtful implementation of proven technologies, like those throughout Intelsat’s global space-and-ground network. Along with integrated traffic optimization that enables improvements of up to 50% in download times across a range of end-user applications, AgileCore UX is the dependable, high-performance backbone upon which our customers can reliably deliver solutions to their users. It’s also notable that no two service-provider installations are the same. For example, one of our customers in South America, unsatisfied with the reliability and service levels they experienced with a “low latency” operator, is making a straightforward cut to AgileCore UX. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, a customer in Northern Africa will use our service to improve the stability of another trunking service, and Intelsat will eventually bond and manage the two connections and integrate traffic optimization over the whole link. In Central Africa, we have the flexibility to quickly bring up service on a service provider’s existing equipment allowing them to begin delivering user services immediately. Later we’ll migrate the AgileCore UX service to higher-performance Intelsat Epic capacity, enabling them to provide the combination of performance and reliability they couldn’t get with competitive services. In each scenario, the AgileCore UX implementation is tailored to meet the specific needs of the service provider and designed to improve their end-users’ experience. As end-users continue to raise their expectations for higher bandwidths and better performance, it’s with the assumption that dependability is built in. We’re seeing that enterprises and service providers are reconsidering what’s important to them and the users they serve, defining user experience as the sum of many parts. Intelsat is also rethinking how we contribute to providing the best support and user experience for our customers and their end-to-end services. Solutions like AgileCore UX enable our service-provider customers to leverage new performance enhancing features without sacrificing the service dependability that’s a basic building block of their success.