Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog

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.

 

 

Posted by Kanwar Virender Singh Narania at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

If we look deeper into this WAC announcement, the most important part of it is that this initiative will promote mobile web based applications rather than native applications developed for an OS platform. Web-based applications (following some sort of web standard like HTML for example) can ease the pain for the operators since they can develop an application that could run on any OS as long as it has a good browser. The time and money required to develop the App for each OS is avoided.

However, given the vastness of the subscriber base we are talking about, even mobile web based applications may be an issue. Not every device today has a Full-HTML capable browser that is powerful enough to render web-based applications. The non-uniformity of the browser experience on the mobile devices will again be a cause of concern for the developers since they cannot provide the same kind of experience for their apps across all of the devices that can be targeted through a common ecosystem. So the fragmentation in terms of user experience will continue to remain.

Also, developers trying to provide a native experience by integrating with the native OS applications like a Dialer, Address Book, GPS, and Calendar can face challenges. So unless these integration methods are normalized, the developers cannot be sure of providing the same level of integration and experience across different devices and OS platforms.

Fragmentation is in fact growing!

To keep up with the competition and to provide differentiated User Experiences, we see efforts from various OEMs and OS-makers to push their device and OS platform harder. In fact, the competition to grab a market share of the Smart phone growth has heated up than never before. If a new device platform has the potential to capture the interest of the consumers, Operators try to grab that as an opportunity to sign up new consumers by signing exclusivity deals with OEMs.

Even in terms of Standards and Platforms, we are seeing fragmentation happen. Groups tend to customize any standard or specification a little so that it is optimized for their own design and customer experience. Suddenly the standard is broken and there are more than one version of the same. We have seen this happen in the past several times. And there has always been a struggle with each new standard or consortium that has tried to solve the problem of fragmentation of any kind!

Consequently from a developer point of view, the App Stores and the target OS platforms become vastly different across different regions and operators across the world. Not to mention the variations  in policies (for content, pricing, and certification) across different App Stores.

Given the state of the industry, it seems we are moving towards even further fragmentation!!

And to this effect, this year's MWC itself showed that the App Store mania was in high gear and we saw an array of announcements from Operators and OEMs around newer Platforms and App Stores. To name some of them:

• WinPhone 7 (by Microsoft who called it a new chapter in Smartphones),
• Samsung Bada,
• MeeGo (Nokia and Intel combined their respective Linux-based OS platforms Maemo and Moblin)  
• Ericsson's eStore, a White-labeled App Store for Operators with 30,000 apps
• And lastly, the "super" app store platform - Wholesale App Community 
• Not to mention the recent merger of Pocketgear and Handango to create one of the largest independently owned App Stores

A Vast Global Market with a very huge potential!

Whether the WAC initiative becomes successful is something that is to be seen! But despite all of the challenges, such an initiative, if implemented correctly, has an enormous potential and will be beneficial to all stakeholders including developers and consumers.

Historically we have seen that common standards have evolved over a period of time and not within a year or two. Likewise, I believe that even an initiative as big as WAC will evolve and mature over a period of the next few years.

And until then, I believe, the App Store Fragmentation will continue to stay and grow! And who the winner is will ofcourse be determined by the Consumers! What are your thoughts?

Posted by Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Moreover, pricing of the embedded mobile device components (particularly the RF chips that enable connectivity of devices) are coming down. Because of this we are seeing a number of device OEMs jumping into capitalize on the opportunity of connected devices and their potential for new, innovative product lines.

With existing network infrastructure, can the carriers support the coming flood of connected devices and the data traffic these devices are going to dump on their wireless networks?

Existing devices themselves are putting a lot of strain on Carrier Networks

With the growing number of smart phone users and the associated data applications, we need to realize that if carriers provide high speed connectivity coupled with “all you can eat” data plans, people are going to exploit it – and we are already seeing that happen with iPhone! Added to these smart phones, is the marketing push that carriers are giving to Data Cards and Netbooks. All of these are already creating significant strain on the carriers networks.

And now comes the flood of Connected Devices!

One of the key drivers of the M2M market is in itself the pervasiveness of the mobile broadband networks. But the growth in the number of devices that generate data traffic will create a strain on the carrier networks that may become unmanageable.

Are carriers ready?

In order to offset the growing load on their networks and support next generation services and devices, operators are investing in network upgrades to LTE and WiMAX. However, we all need to agree that the upgraded network’s ability to support faster data traffic will in turn drive more usage. This becomes like a “catch-22” for them. Carriers will need to effectively manage their operations and network capacity so as to allow as much number of devices as possible without having any negative impact on the quality of service they provide.

This is where carriers have started looking at alternative ways to offset the load on their data networks. Some of them have turned to Femtocells and others to Wi-Fi hotspots to dump data traffic from their heavily strained 3G networks. This will apply to M2M Embedded devices also. The device manufactures would need to start gravitating towards producing dual-mode radio modules for their embedded devices that leverage an alternative network if that is available without being heavily dependent on carrier’s data network.

Adding connected Devices on top of all the new M2M scenarios (that are being demonstrated and discussed) seems like a lot, especially when we're watching AT&T struggle to support the iPhone!

Are the carriers ready for the coming flood of connected devices? What are your thoughts?

Posted by Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri at 1:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

The key areas to focus would include rapid integration of third party service platforms with the home network OSS environment (where necessary), changing the customer acquisition and order management modules, changing the mediation system(s) to process the new / revised usage records, setting-up the service offerings and charging elements in the Billing systems, changing the bill templates/ formats, setting-up the revenue sharing models and data sharing interfaces, Data security and access control when sharing info with the third parties, establishing agreed processes for reconciliation and revised MIS reporting. While the Business and Marketing teams would want the ‘Time-to-Market’ to be the shortest, typically the IT team requires a long lead time to ensure all the above changes are made, systems are tested, staff are trained for overall readiness.

In view of the above, the Billing Managers are always striving to achieve the agility/ nimbleness within the Organization by establishing/refining the procedures and processes. Having a skilled / dependable IT team with a combination of in-house and Supplier(s)/ partner(s), planning ahead, prudent decisions on automation with cost-benefit analysis, staff training, right level of communication and information sharing with the in-house & third parties are important for fulfilling the expectations of the Business, the customers and the third parties. Besides that, having a feature rich, modularized, flexible/adaptable Billing system and leveraging its capabilities will go a long way in helping with meeting the above challenges.
 

Leveraging the Billing system would involve, answering several key questions. These would be - How are the products / services to be modeled and set-up in the existing Billing system? How to make the new products available to the target customers (new and existing)? How to mass migrate current live customers from their existing service bundles to new ones? How the new bills are to look like? Whether or not (and how )to indicate the third party service items on the bills  distinct from on-house services? How do we track the home network revenue distinct from third party revenue?.How to fulfill the data sharing needs, while ensuring the Data security and access control? And many more.
 

Being aware of the features, capabilities and limitations(if any) of the existing billing environment would be quite important in answering these questions. So, the task is to have and maintain expertise on the Billing system, evolving good quality repeatable / re-usable best practices, standardizing on procedures for incorporating changes in various modules and interfaces with a view to simplify the task of meeting future requirements, ensuring quality testing  activities, periodic in-house/ third party reporting and reconciliation besides house-keeping activities to maintain a clean and healthy environment.

Posted by Nagaraja Sheshappanavar at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Though billing systems are often perceived as business back end operations, billing plays a vital role in the communication service providers’ (CSP) marketing & sales strategy. Billing is an integral part of customer experience. Hence it is very crucial for a CSP’s billing transformation programme to ensure business continuity and error free bills to customer.

Foremost task before embarking on a transformation journey is building up right business case to identify current and imminent billing requirements. This is followed by selecting the right billing vendor and software package, identifying integration technology and business processes refinements. Once these are identified, the focus needs to be shifted on drawing out a transformation strategy, implementation and roll out plans. The billing transformation strategy should keep in consideration, the holistic future billing requirements catering to customer needs, marketing plans, competitive market segments and industry best practices.

Another key challenge is selecting the right solutions and product vendors capable of providing the next generation billing system which are highly scalable, flexible, and easy to integrate and meets future business requirements. Vendor selection needs rigorous selection process through score card analysis on each billing parameter demonstrating capabilities through Proof of Concepts.

Agile Transformation plans have to be decided through early integration strategy. End users’ involvement can be achieved via implementation strategies such as big bang approach or phased roll out, depending on the transformation journey.

Success of Billing Data Migration is a core aspect of transformation journey - how, where & what billing data to be migrated ensuring data integrity. Customer profiling and data transformation are central part to Migration programme.

A successful Transformation programme requires strong business case, committed business leadership, Right Solutions, Customer Centric focus, Strong Programme & Change Management Mechanism.

Watch out in next blog: ‘Billing Transformation Programme – Part 2: Implementation Strategies’

Posted by Shivakumar Ramachandran at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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: 

1.       Development methodology:  The Methodology adopted for migration plays a critical role in the success of billing migration. Traditionally a high risk approach - big bang approach (waterfall model) is followed for a migration program.  Instead of going for a big-bang approach, a progressive/incremental approach (agile methodology) would be a better approach. The later approach will help track the migration solution closely, provide continuous feedback for the subsequent phases of migration, keep the minimum down time for the billing cycle and will help the development team to cope up with the changes due to the new requirements raised by business in parallel to the migration.
2.       Usage of  real time data for design and testing:
a.       Design and analysis teams must look at the real time data to get good understanding of the data for better mapping/design. Mapping not only needs to address the best case scenario but also needs to address the deviated customer data.
b.      Testing teams should use real-time data (old copy of production data) which will help discover the defects at an early stage. This minimizes the number of issues in production as handcrafted data may not work in production.
c.       In case of a CSP having large customer base on legacy stack, to ensure that new functionality works for the migrated customer – use migrated data for performing functional testing of new stack.
3.       Streamlining the business processes:  In addition to the data cleansing activity, CSP can also use the migration program as an opportunity to stream line their business processes, keeping package customizations to a minimum level and gaining the ability to provide out of box features – reducing the time to market.
4.       Parallel Runs during UAT :
a.       To minimize issues post migration, it is beneficial to have a parallel run approach during testing of the migration solution. Hence bills are produced from legacy and new stacks before and after migration. This can be limited to acceptance testing phase.
b.      In case of highly complex environments and huge data on the legacy stack, this approach can be extended to production for initial two bills.
5.       Educating the customer:  We can expect some bill format differences post the migration due to many reasons, eg. Proration of charges or presentation of usage which spans across off-peak and peak time period.  It is essential to identify the known differences upfront and educate the customer indicating the expected changes in the presentation of the bill.

Posted by Ashok Reddy Nomula at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

With Forbes dubbing "Everything as a Service" as one of the mega-trends of 2010, does it really apply to Telecom Billing as well? Well it turns out that the paradigm of "Billing as a service" is here to stay not only in 2010 but beyond, for the business benefits are far too many and way too compelling. As we know, in this model, the cost of buying and licensing the traditional enterprise software are thrown out of the window, and is replaced by a pay-per-subscription or a pay-per-usage model thereby drastically reducing the costs of operation. Billing as a service implies functions like pricing, product management, customer management, rating, billing and invoicing are available on a "pay per usage of service" model.

Posted by Abhishek Singh at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

1. Variance of Local Regulatory Requirements: Many Countries have strict data specific regulations, where in, the movement of Customer data out of that country or region is restricted, since such data is considered highly confidential and secure. If a Billing System or corresponding data centre is out of the Country’s jurisdiction, it might not be possible to have the customer data sent across in the same shape and format. There are various solutions to handle this problem. Business teams need to do a complete analysis of this issue taking help from the legal authorities and choose a right solution to resolve this. Infosys provides a highly flexible solution (tool) for data masking to effectively mask the data before sending it out of the specific regions.
2. Disparate Billing Systems and Lack of Documentation: Legacy Billing Systems could vary hugely across geographies. There could be a few regions where a small Microsoft Access based tool is used as a billing system. Such small tools would not have much of a documentation or at times, it becomes extremely difficult to pull out the business rules after analyzing the product. In our experience, there were instances where a huge product is deployed and run for years with loads of customizations and little documentation to support. Operational documents alone will be available but will not help the consolidation team much. Infosys has developed a proven, robust methodology to analyze an existing system and draw Business Requirements from it.
3. Data Cleansing, Migration and Consistency: Data Quality would be a huge issue if the billing system is poorly maintained over years. Migrating such a system to the new Strategic Billing System would be very critical in the entire implementation cycle. A complete analysis of all critical data entities has to be taken up, followed by some automated data cleansing. History could be preserved based on the importance in the target billing system. Migration activity should be started only after the complete cleansing of data to avoid integrity issues. Infosys has a well defined Data Migration Methodology and readily deployable Framework which defines a Seven Entity Approach for Data Migration.
4. Planning and Timelines: Maintaining a planned pace of implementation across regions, lines of businesses and countries is a difficult job. The Program Management Office has to track the various aspects in a streamlined fashion. Incase of parallel de-phasing of systems in various regions, it is always recommended to setup the PMO across the regions, tactically, to stay closer with the project teams and bring better perspective to the Steering Committee of the progress.
5. Choice of Right Package / Solution: Though the market leading billing products are all good fit for a consolidated billing scenario, it is very important for the Organizations to look at the amount of Customization being done on these packages to meet the needs. The most important parameters to be looked at are Scalability, Performance, Multi-Currency/Multi-Language Support, Centralized Data Support, Capability to Integrate with various systems and Percentage of Customization.

It is important that the Global Organizations run through all these challenges and strike the right balance between these issues and requirements during the business case preparation stage itself and then proceed with further planning of consolidating the billing systems.

 

Posted by Prasanth Kumar at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

With the surge in telecom service providers’ offerings for value added services, telecom bill has become complex with plethora of information in the bill. The challenge lies in striking the balance between ease of use for customer in understanding the bill and the service provider’s ease of implementation.

In this Quad play world, convergence is the buzz word. Billing systems support Quad play billing but the challenge is how effective and customer friendly the bill is. A typical Quad play can have the following services:

 Mobile
 IPTV
 Fixed line
 Broadband

Any customer experience with a complex Quad play bill would be: 

 Segmenting the different charges billed for different services
 Reconciling the total sum of all services
 Checking the current bill of each services
 Checking the previous balances of each services if any
 Identifying in which service the usage has increased and where the usage has come down
 Which tariff to go for based on the services
 Understanding the overall charges, subcomponents, summary and other charges

An ideal Quad play bill should take care of all the above complexities and it should be as simple as possible. The customer segment differs from premium to normal and high ARPU to average ARPU. At the same time, customer background also varies across service geographies. This also plays a major role while implementing billing systems and bill formats.

These are just a few thoughts on Customer friendly Bill template; you are most welcome to add your further thoughts on this.

Posted by Sripathy Srinivasan at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

With the changing competitive environment and the new age/ innovative multi-party business models, the Business Strategies invariably change. However, the investment in refining the systems that help with customer acquisition, order/service management, Rating and Billing systems, bill presentment tend to lag by several months, if not years. The results are obvious that they miss-out on achieving their goals.

For the customers, prompt service management, accurate and timely bills, flexibility for making payments, etc, are key elements of “Trust for long term relationship”. Hence, to succeed in the present competitive market environment, investing in the evolution of robust Billing and collection systems and processes to win the customers trust is ‘key’ for successful implementation of any business strategy. The Organizations, who get this right, will succeed with any Business Strategy in any market conditions.

In view of the above, the main areas of focus for a successful billing implementation would include – a network agnostic, flexible Rating capability, a feature rich and scalable Billing capability that supports management of life cycle of retail & corporate customers, product life cycle management, versatile bundling and discounting features that helps with cross-selling and up-selling, simple and flexible bill presentment and collection management features and so-on. For the operators that offer enriched services with third party content and services, a billing solution that has matured with managing multi-party services and relationship management capabilities would be critical for running the business smoothly.

To maximize the business value of the implementation of a sophisticated and robust billing solution the emphasis should be on accurate mapping of the Business process requirements to the capabilities of the solution. Besides a good implementation, the success of a Business Strategy depends on establishing foolproof Business processes around the implemented solution, staff training and effective communication within the Organization, with the partners and suppliers.

If anyone has any comments, views, thoughts or related experience on the above topic, please feel free to share. I would love to hear from you. You can also reach me on my email id Nagaraja_S@Infosys.com.

 

 

Posted by Nagaraja Sheshappanavar at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)