The Need for a Customer-centric Approach for Services Development and Operation in the Brazilian Telecommunications Market

Historically, Brazilian Telecommunications Service Providers (SP's) have created services entirely based on the available technology platforms, an excessively technical approach (usually dubbed "build it and they'll come") that has distorted their perception of what Quality of Service means. Furthermore, the day-to-day operation of these services has been focused only on maintaining a set of network-related metrics at adequate levels. The end user, on the other hand, understands Quality of Service as a matter of Customer Care and Support. This difference in understanding leads to the need of a change in both the methodology used by SP's to create new services and the techniques used to manage these services once deployed. The new service development methodology, the focus of this paper, must be able to assess users' needs and translate them into meaningful parameters to be captured by newly developed services. Quality Function Deployment fits this bill perfectly. The new operation techniques must bring the Service Provider closer to the more abstract requirements of the customer (including emotional and affective requirements and perceptions). Are the current Service Level Management techniques adequate to this reality?