Telecom convergence and customer centricity
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Livewire is Infosys’ blog for the emerging communications industry. Discuss the latest trends with our experts.
March 09, 2010
March 05, 2010
Changing billing practices and role of Network edge Billing
Traditionally, service providers relied mainly upon price plan improvement and their core network assets as sources of competitive advantage. However, customer demands and competitive pressures are giving rise to flat-rate plans over complex billing plans. The emergence of IP based networks and services have moved customer expectations from basic requirements such as connectivity, to those provided by device manufacturers, application, and content providers. This is both an opportunity and a threat to the future revenues and has become a challenge to the Service Providers to develop sustainable revenue.
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February 25, 2010
Leveraging e-bill strategy in the Indian telecom market
A recent advertisement by an Indian Communication Service provider (CSP) for reducing the use of paper got me thinking…Can the Indian telecom industry do a little more in this regard. No doubt, generating awareness on the potential use of mobile applications to reduce the use of paper is a great idea. But providing a monetary incentive to their customers to move from using paper to an electronic medium will go a long way in ‘Walking the talk’.
Though the broadband density in India is currently not high and not every bill paying customer has access to a web enabled medium, but this strategy can definitely be used to target the ones who do have access, thus making them early adopters to the use of electronic billing/web self care. With the increase in broadband density, this idea will only grow with more customers adopting the web as a medium to receive (and pay) their bills.
For a CSP, the bill printing and postage costs are 5 times more than that of delivering an electronic copy of the bill. Passing these cost benefits down to the customer who opt to receive an e-bill is a good strategy to promote the ‘Green’ initiative. The bill could be mailed to the customers email ID or loaded on to the customer’s online account with the service provider and the customer can easily access it via any web enabled device. Its not that the Indian CSPs do not have an online presence or are not using an EBPP (Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment) application to enhance their web presence and promote customer self care and payment. It is just that not enough incentives are being provided to effectively promote these to customers. Promoting the use of E-billing/ web self care applications will, additionally, help drive down the billing support costs by diverting traffic from notably the most expensive customer support channel i.e. the Voice customer care channel. This will help the CSP in reducing costs as well promoting the ‘green’ initiative.
Another idea could be to promote automated payment methods to pay bills (ECS); this will ensure that the money is automatically deducted from the customers account at a preagreed date/schedule after bill generation. The benefits of reduction of payment processing costs can also be passed in the form of discounts to customers who pay by direct debit. This will also reduce the use of paper (paper currency/ cheques).
The idea of transferring the cost savings to customers who choose to receive only an electronic copy of the bill or choose to pay their bills automatically, is already being used as a promotion strategy in Europe by some CSPs. In a hyper price sensitive Indian telecom market, these promotions are bound to succeed.
February 24, 2010
Is Mobile App Store Fragmentation here to stay?
I had addressed this subject of App Store Fragmentation in one of my earlier posts. And I started thinking about this question especially in the backdrop of the news about the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) which unraveled in the recently concluded Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. WAC, backed by 24 operators and 3 OEMs, is an initiative to create a single, unified, open platform where mobile app developers can build and deploy applications that can work across a universe of devices and operating systems supported by these 24 carriers. Potentially, this could be a miracle for app developers since they can make their apps available for “the largest” target subscriber base across a roster of carriers.
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February 21, 2010
The coming flood of connected devices! Are the carriers ready?
Mobile Network operators (MNOs) are in a very good position to capitalize on the Embedded Mobile devices opportunity that includes Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications. We are already seeing major operators including Verizon, AT&T and Vodafone investing significant resources into their emerging devices and M2M groups.
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February 16, 2010
Leveraging ‘Billing’ in the multi-party multi-service context
In the current competitive environment, it has become imperative for service providers to offer creative/ innovative blend of services. Large Organizations have dedicated teams for creating such offerings with a combination of in-house and third party services. The main challenge in achieving success in this process is to achieve the shortest ‘Time-to-market’ from conceiving the idea to making it available for customers.
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February 12, 2010
Billing Transformation Programme – Part 1: Key Challenges
Billing transformation is not just an organization wide initiative to streamline and reduce operational cost, but has multi dimensions and challenges like business continuity, customer experience, technology, business process fitments, regulatory requirements and competitive market
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February 11, 2010
Addressing the challenges faced in telecom billing migration projects
In my previous blog post, I listed some of the key challenges faced by Communication service providers while migrating their billing systems. Now let us see how these challenges can be addressed:
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February 09, 2010
Billing as a Service
Top 5 Challenges in Global Rollout of Billing System
Of late, many multi-national organizations are coming up with strategic plans to consolidate their billing systems across various geographies. This solution throws many advantages to the global companies in terms of controlling their costs, reducing operational issues, Centralization of data etc. This can also result in better program governance, change management and heavy reduction in duplication of IT Solutions. Many market leading billing packages offer flexibility to such requirements and can be very good fit here. On the other hand, Global Companies should also look at various potential issues they might face during consolidation and be prepared with mitigation strategies. Here are such top five challenges, as we have seen in our experience.
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February 05, 2010
Telecom Bill in a Customer friendly format in Multi service scenario
Continue reading "Telecom Bill in a Customer friendly format in Multi service scenario" »
February 03, 2010
Billing and your Business Strategy
For success, every Business Strategy needs to pay requisite attention to a) what they want to charge their customers for and b) how to produce accurate bill & collect correct money. Although, this may sound like a first rule in business, many organizations – large and small, do not give adequate attention to this critical piece and end-up losing customers and fail to achieve their business goals.
January 28, 2010
Importance of introducing new Billing systems for Media and Entertainment companies
January 20, 2010
Need for transforming billing systems
Convergence in Telecom billing
With changing consumer lifestyles, continuously evolving in providing new services has become the mantra for Communication service providers (CSPs) to sustain stiff competition. Traditional stovepipe billing systems support either voice, data, mobile or video services at a time. Investing in individual billing systems for each service type is not an optimal proposition from an operational as well as maintenance perspective. Also from a customer’s perspective, they are keen to opt for bundled services which include triple play (voice, data and video) and quadruple play (adding mobility to voice, data and video), instead of buying single individual services.
January 18, 2010
Telecoms: It’s time to Cloud-Source!
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