to identify strategies for service differentiation based on the assur- ance process. Standardizing forums are also giving due importance to assurance with dedicated groups like ICcM (integrated customer centric management) in TeleManagement Forum (TMF) working on customer related issues in assurance. The goal of a customer centric assurance is to: Fix customer issues in minimum possible time: The customer is worried about his service and will be calling the support desk for a quick and concise solu- tion to the problem. The quality of customer service depends on how much the customer is satisfied at the end of the call. For this reason, extensive train- ing is offered to call center professionals with the intent to improve customer experience. Real time monitoring of customer experience: Customer service can be a key differentiator in making a service provider more lucrative to a customer com- pared to its competitor. Similar to monitoring the service and the network, the customer experience also needs to be monitored for customer retention and satisfaction. For this reason the customer calls may be recorded for analy- sis of customer service quality. OSS/BSS Functions Identify the service and network performance: After deployment, the issues raised by the customer is a valuable source to identify the quality of service, the bugs in the service and the underlying network and the issues that needs to be fixed in similar service offerings that are active or will be provisioned in the future. Based on bugs reported by customers, if the bug density of a product is relatively high and leading to law suits, then those services can be revoked for releasing an improved version and for planning toward new products. Identify reliable third-party vendors: There can be multiple third-party ven- dors handling support and assurance functions. These could be suppliers of the network equipment, external call center professionals, or developers of the services. The equipment failures gives an indication of which vendor can be app