Belgacom to offer mobile service quality guarantees thanks to Alcatel-Lucent

Paris, September 17, 2012 – Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is giving Belgacom, Belgium’s leading communications service provider, the ability to measure the performance of mobile services offered to business customers, enabling Belgacom to guarantee that service level agreements (SLAs) are being met.

Business customers want simple, reliable, always-on mobile communications solutions. With Alcatel-Lucent’s Service Quality Manager (SQM)  – part of the company’s portfolio of Motive Mobile Experience Analytics solutions – Belgacom can accurately report on a range of key performance and quality indicators (such as service availability and reliability) that are important to its corporate clients. In turn, Belgacom can use this information to take actions to improve their clients’ customer experience.

Alcatel-Lucent’s SQM enables Belgacom to translate its commitment to quality into concrete SLAs which guarantee (and continuously improve) mobile voice, data and SMS services for its corporate customers.

SQM will help Belgacom manage service quality in five core areas:

• Monitoring – by closely monitoring the  performance   experienced by  the end users  and triggering alarms in case of  degradation of service quality
• Informing – by providing corporate customers with instant notifications and updates on major outages that are  impacting their business
• Demonstrating – by reporting on the actual performance of Belgacom’s mobile voice, data and SMS services, as measured over a given period of time
• Improving – by defining a set of actions and initiatives to improve the customer experience when using Belgacom’s mobile products
• Committing – by defining and codifying the customer-specific service levels to be reached

Jan Paesen, Director Product Management Enterprise Mobility Solutions, from Belgacom said: “Our mission is to assure our customers that the mobile services we are providing live up to their expectations. Alcatel-Lucent’s Service Quality Management solution is instrumental in reaching this objective – providing a host of benefits both for us and for our business customers. As importantly, by means of SQM’s reporting functionality we can actually prove to our customers that they are indeed receiving the quality for which they contracted. This real-time monitoring of the customer experience is unique on the Belgian market.”

Luc Defieuw, VP CIS, North, Central and Eastern Europe from Alcatel-Lucent said: “OurSQM will be a key asset for people throughout Belgacom’s organization, from the operations and network planning department, to marketing and customer care personnel. It has not only been built to support mobile services and network technologies; going forward, it could also be applied to Belgacom’s fixed and video activities. In light of what SQM can deliver and our long standing history of superior collaboration in network building and deployment, our solution was a natural choice for Belgacom.”

Alcatel-Lucent’s Service Quality Manager is an integral part of the company’s recently launched Motive portfolio of customer experience solutions (CXS). The Motive CXS portfolio helps service providers forge stronger and more valuable customer relationships and foster long-lasting brand loyalty by building customer-focused improvements into their products and services.