Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog

A Telecom Prepaid Scenario is quite well established. There are many players with their scalable COTS products and solutions which cater to Telecom Prepaid Services. If we look into the various applications in this prepaid-billing area, there are the network switches, Service Control Points, Radius/Diameter Protocol governers and the billing systems performing Authentication, Accounting, Balance Management and Call Management.

For service providers managing content online, particularly in web services industry, prepaid services are not completely explored yet.

There can be many different attractive options to be rolled out to the end customers if Web Services industry embraces the Prepaid services heavily. A quick scenario that comes to my mind is the Advertisements that are put up in websites and number of clicks being counted. Advertiser can buy a $50 pack for 5000 Clicks. Every click on the Banner will reduce the balance on his account and the advertisement would cease to show up when the balance becomes 0. A prepaid billing system is best suited to handle such real time requirements. But, how is it going to be connected to the webservers? Who would act as an SCP in this scenario? Some products have built in diameter managers which can be used for meeting certain requirements. Do you know of other best practices for this purpose?

From the CAPEX/OPEX perspective, I presume, it takes a few more years for these prepaid COTS packages to evolve, become less-complex and more suitable for the web content scenario. Since this part of industry cannot be compared straight away to Telecom in annual revenue turnover, it is important that the COTS packages to bridge the gap by becoming more flexible and requirement friendly for this industry.

Posted by Prasanth Kumar at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In today’s world the biggest challenge in front of the Service Providers is to decide on which business area they should focus more on. There is a dilemma on whether it has to be Operational Excellence, Customer Intimacy or the Product Leadership. Moreover it is very difficult for them to choose and analyze the right sets of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each business area which are not only responsible to drive these processes but also act as a key factor to enhance the business by correlating different business elements within the focused area.

For a successful and sustainable business it is imperative to identify and measure the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Using KPIs, Service Providers will able to measure the health of the system and ensure that all individuals at all levels are “marching in step” to the same goals and strategies defined by them. This will further guarantee a long-term profitability from operations.

Therefore, a robust KPI Management Framework is required to manage and keep the overall hygiene of the organization / unit / department / service / networks / systems. The framework will give service providers a quantifiable means to identify, measure and improve target business areas. KPI Management Framework is governed by simple rules & logics to Identify, Prioritize, Standardize the KPIs.

With the help of KPI Management framework, they will able to maximize their benefits from collected data, by offering a systematic approach consisting of three key steps:

• Identify KPIs for improving efficiency and profitability
• Validate the quality of data used to develop KPI Metrics
• Leverage the KPI metrics to make business decisions

This effective mechanism ensures that any operator, using this mechanism, will able to continuously outperform the competition and deliver high value services to their customers.  Following are the key benefits in using a KPI based measurement system:

• Improved Commited to Delivered Customer Experience
• Optimized processes leading to peak performance
• Abilitiy to identify, measure and improve target business areas
• Campare with the Industry benchmarks on processes
• Highlight pain areas for improvements
• in-line with Industry defined standards and framewors such as eTOM

The availability of such a measurement framework would help service providers calibre and improve their customer experience as well as operationally improve resulting in two fold benefits of customer satisfaction and opeational efficiency.

Posted by Nikhil Datar at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This expectation is more than often shattered by the billing disputes such as Payment disputes; Rating disputes; Promotion/discount disputes and other disputes for various charges levied. Some of the customer reactions with any of these billing disputes not being resolved would be: 

 Loosing trust on the service provider and churn out when there is no resolution
 Spread a bad word of mouth through different social networking
 Billing default.

 On the other hand, if these disputes are resolved effectively, it would lead to:

 Cross sell and up sell opportunity from a happy customer
 Customer  loyalty

Dispute management depends on how robust the processes are while implementing billing systems. A robust system should be able to tackle either an issue created by the system or an issue that may be due to the processes touching the system. Any implementation needs to take care of both these issues to become a trusted brand.

These are just a few thoughts on importance of billing dispute handling; you are most welcome to add your further thoughts on this.

Posted by Sripathy Srinivasan at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While embarking on billing transformation, business support for live customers needs to be continued with minimal disruptions. Also, it becomes essential to simultaneously provide support to on-going market promotions.  Thus, transformation journeys for billing systems is a complex and daunting task for any CSP’s as discussed in my previous blog: “Billing Transformation Programme – Part 1: Key Challenges”.

Now let us look at the implementation strategies: Big Bang approach and Phased approach. Depending upon active customer base, market segments, product lines and business needs (continuity) on legacy stack – Big Bang or Phased/Iterative Migration Strategies can be decided. Each of them has its own pros & cons.

Before embarking on implementation strategy, following factors need to be evaluated:
§  What customer data and by when it needs to migrated
§  List of products, services and promotions offered for different customer markets
§  Volume and complexity of customer migration data
§  Extract Transform & Load Tools to be used
§  Data Cleanse Strategy – to remove customer data anomalies
§  Products rationalisation & withdrawals i.e. what products or services to be provided on new stack and what needs to be withdrawn during transformations
§  Planning  parallel bills runs & trial test
§  Re-fitment of existing business processes

Posted by Shivakumar Ramachandran at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Parallel run is nothing but running the rating and billing processes in parallel to generate bills and associated reports in both legacy and new stack followed by a comparison cycle to check whether the new system behaves as expected for a given input data.

Posted by Ashok Reddy Nomula at 6:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For  some time now, we have all been hearing the convergence story, multi services all billed at a single point with discounting and loyalty points multiplied on the basis of cross-product consumption.  However, when we dig a bit deeper, it appears that really this only applies to post-paid services, as the limitations around calculating call/event costs in real-time mean pre-paid services are effectively still stand alone.

There are good business reasons for this, but charging technology and the cost of technology should not be the barrier to enhancing these services. 

So how and where does this get resolved?  Is this a software or hardware issue?  Traditionally the nearer real-time a cost has to be calculated, the less complex the rate plan had to be, as the cost of hardware either as part of an IN or a RADIUS/DIAMETER aware BSS seems to rise exponentially with the volume of calls or the complexity of calculation.  This model isn’t sustainable for operators as they aren’t able to pass the cost onto the consumers of their services.

From some investigation we’ve doing, we see new technologies starting to exist, in-memory databases, increased transaction per minute without building server farms, faster processing algorithms amongst them.  However it’s not clear which innovation will come to dominate. 

I’d be interested to hear other people’s views on this, as it’s always interesting to be on the cusp of changing technologies or business models.

And I haven’t mentioned roaming………………..

Posted by Ian Willams at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Abhishek Singh at 5:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

The existing pre-paid and post paid billing systems provide a solid foundation but are not capable to provide real time transaction management for large volume data. They are neither agile nor cost affective to support the change in business models and billing practices. Moreover they are inflexible and treat the account management, subscriber interaction and bill presentment processes in a uni - direction way. These systems were primarily architectured and designed for uncompressed voice, to support VPN and freefone to process high volumes of data in batch. The IN platform was re-engineered to suit the prepaid architecture, but it could not perform well for IP- based services due to their bursty nature and high volumes of transactions.
This shortcoming can be resolved by providing a dynamic and responsive interface between network, customer, and accounting data. This can be achieved by augmenting the existing systems with an agile, interactive and highly scalable infrastructure that will increase the intelligence of the application by moving the functions such as account management, subscriber interaction and usage details close to the customer i.e. to the network edge. This will enable them to personalize the services on their own and provide them accurate, current and instant access to the usage data, account balances, service bundles, advice-of-change notice, and promotional offers improving the customer experience. For SPS this will reduce customer care costs by moving these functions from back office to highly dynamic and responsive interface.  This re-modeling will require introducing a new control layer which will touch the network layer and interact with the back office systems to unite the network and subscriber data. For ex: For P2P connection to control the session to manage traffic against an account balance, the capability to manage and control a subscriber session resides at the network edge interacting with devices, routers, and application servers etc. to extract relevant information.

Posted by Ashish M Wandile at 6:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)