The Livewire blog creates the forum for Infosys, Communication Service Providers and Media and Entertainment Companies to discuss and share insights on the key industry challenges, opportunities, trends and solutions.
What drives CSP's to opt for Managed Billing Services?
Of late, communication service providers are inclined to enter into a managed services deal with IT vendors. According to Gartner's Communications Industry IT report, worldwide spending on IT outsourcing will grow at a 5 percent compounded annual growth rate for the next five years. These large scale outsourcing deals are not only beneficial from a cost saving perspective, but also would help to increase top-line revenue generations.
Managed billing services provide key business benefits such as
• Quick lead time to market - driven by Service level agreements. Ready to use solutions and systems support available • Reduced Operational cost - Systems developed & maintained by Service bureau providers with no over head running cost for CSPs. • Shared Risk, Shared Reward - Shared between CSP and managed service host
Managed billing services integrated with existing business processes removes the need to have a dedicated billing development and operations team for the CSPs. CPS's instead of worrying about operational cost and system issues can focus on their core business activities and leave nity-grity of maintaining and running systems to managed service providers.
These days major IT and product vendors are offering managed billing bureau services by hosting billing solutions on shared platform custom build on standard COTs package. Managed services are hosted on bureau service provider premises who own hardware and software. On shared platform, separate billing instances configured and customized for specific requirements of communication service providers can be hosted. Along with billing services, truly integrated e2e CRM and provisioning services can be built.
There is good un-tapped market for IT vendors to provide managed billing bureau services. Need to watch this space in coming months with renewed focus from CSP's to cut down their ever growing operating expenditure and cut throat market competition.
In my previous blog, I discussed how telecom billing migration challenges can be addressed. In this blog, I have made an attempt to highlight the importance of customer profiling.
Over a period of time, legacy systems and data most likely undergo a host of changes, making billing data very complex. For example, many a times one time scripts or workarounds are applied in production to correct data and introduce customer specific pricing plans/offers to attract customers, which otherwise would require major changes in the application. With data residing in multiple systems, forming a 360 degree view of the customer becomes difficult especially when there is lack of product hierarchy in the legacy system. For example, a customer might be allowed to order multiple quantities of a particular product in the legacy system but the new system does not allow such lapses on account of product hierarchy capabilities.
To handle such complexity in customer Data, customer profiling helps becomes imperative for better design and control of migrations solutions.
In addition to customer categorizations like residential, business and corporate types, we also need to look at the various offerings by telecom service providers for better understanding of the customer's data. For example, there are services like Voice and Data (GPRS, Broadband and Internet) and plans like unlimited weekend, unlimited Data download, unlimited evening and weekend, free calls to family numbers etc. Customers who have these services or plans can be considered as vertical functionalities. Then, there are functionalities like payment method and billing frequency (monthly, quarterly) which are opted by customers across the various services and plans. An example of a customer profile would be - A residential type customer with voice service, monthly billing and cash payment can be identified as one profile.
The table below shows one way of customer profiling as an example.
Payment Plan Voice Services
Residential Corporate Business
Payment by Cash CP1 CP2 CP3
Monthly Payment Plan CP4 CP5 CP6
In the above example, six profiles have been identified. This has to be done across customer types, services etc in order to complete the profiling for the entire customer base. Once the profiling is done on the entire customer database, design and testing of the migrations solution should be done around these customer profiles to ensure a smooth and successful migration.
This is the month we have the 3G auction complete in India. I read the news that France and Germany also have closed on their 3G auctions. Many operators have got the licenses across the Indian states with no operator securing the licenses for all 22 circles. We should be interested in the impact 3G has on these operator's BSS stack.
Coming to the BSS stack all of these operators posses, it is highly likely that they will have their heads deeply buried into assessment of their BSS stack and its compatibility to handle the 3G services. Billing being the most critical module in BSS, it is imperative for these operators to understand the complexities of the billing systems to rate and bill the 3G services. Most of the billing systems promise of being 3G compatible, but it is always better to have them tested with these services thoroughly. Operators should be looking at configuration of those 3G products with which they are going to the market. Some of the billing systems might have a larger impact than just the configuration changes. This needs to be assessed in a detailed manner and proper budget allocations have to be made depending on the program size.
There is one more thing, which the Operator and implementer (SI) should worry about - The final consolidated bill including the 3G service usage. All the applications in the entire BSS stack need to understand the new 3G language and see that the consolidated bill along with the mention of 3G usage comes out upto the expectations of the operator's business and marketing teams.
A 3G service over prepaid is a different ball game. There is a good involvement of network components to handle the 3G services and keep the call on, based on end customer's prepaid balance. Do you have more thoughts on what a prepaid billing system should be worrying about when 3G is introduced to it?
Convergence has for long been labeled
as the buzzword of the communication industry. Convergence, as a phenomenon, is
having its impact felt across almost every communication, media &
entertainment platform. Owing to the seamless possibilities it offers, the
consumers have been a witness to unique variety of service mashups, spanning across devices and technologies. Web &
Mobile as a medium have already started morphing into their new avatars; however,
the age-old "idiot-box" is the latest one to be touched by this
transformation.
Almost a decade earlier, the concept
of communication had an altogether different meaning to it. The consumer
experience was uniquely categorized into different contexts, each being enabled
by certain set of devices or mediums. Web symbolized a context full of
interactivity, exclusivity and an "anywhere" kind of experience, TV
represented the living room context where friends and family gather for a communal
viewing experience whereas the mobile brought in exclusiveness, personalization
and mobility. These mediums carried the information or content from the content
providers, over the distribution networks, to the customer premises for
rendering. These devices were also closely tied up to the overall distribution
infrastructure & topology and therefore had unique constraints in
terms of the content that they could render.
The "living-room"
experimentation of technology and consumer behavior started a few years back.
The TVs of early years offered a "lean back" experience that was essentially
broadcast, offering no interactivity or personalization. The consumer
experience was primarily tied to the fixed programming schedule available from
the service providers with no control available to the end user.
Enabling the living room experience
The onset of convergence as a
phenomenon started to make a paradigm shift, by bridging the gap between the service
or content producer and their consumer. The transport & distribution medium
between the two converged and evolved beyond the constraints of specific
content type that could be rendered on a device.
One of the key enabler for this transformation
has been the commoditization & cheap availability of high bandwidth in the
last mile. This has made the video streaming over internet a reality and has
helped evolve the consumer behavior accordingly. The video viewing on the
internet has become a common web usage scenario as more and more people turn to
the web channel, for viewing videos online.
Secondly, technology has played its
role to have significantly evolved the transport, distribution and network infrastructure
used in delivering the content to the end user. As a result, the notion of TV
as a "broadcast" or one way communication has changed. The return path
provisioning has really made interactivity on TV a possibility thereby paving
way for the development of TV based interactive apps.
Evolution of user experience on web
and mobile has been another factor influencing the TV transformation. The
personalization, exclusivity and interactivity offered by the other two mediums
is actually influencing and evolving the consumer behavior to a level that is
purely missing in any form of TV viewing. The traditional TV viewing has forced
users to align to the fixed programming schedule available with no scope for
customization of flexibility. This shortcoming has been very well leveraged by
the concept of "online video" - an entertainment concept that is utilizing internet as a delivery medium, to offer a serious competition to the TV industry.
Another key differentiator has been
brought about by the linear expansion of user experience on web and mobile. A typical user
can now use a single medium to have a mix of experience varying from communication
needs, information exchange, social connect to finally viewing an episode
of his favorite soap that he missed last week. Convergence has enabled an uninterrupted
experience for the user, without having to switch from one device to another. for the different lifestyle needs This
has provided the end users with the much awaited freedom and flexibility to
align the converged experience to their lifestyles than the other way round.
The impact
As a result, we've been a witness to
strategic shifts spanning the entire digital ecosystem. Service Providers,
OEMs, third party app vendors - all included have stepped up efforts to get
their share in the pie, as more and more content and applications start spanning
across the device or platform boundaries. Multi-Screen strategy has been on top of the
agenda as it offers two pronged benefits - contains the churn in an ever
increasing competition and also adds effectively to the ARPU figures.
However, for the TV industry, it
has clearly highlighted the onset of following trends:
End user perspective:
TV might not be the only medium or device that people will use for satisfying
their entertainment appetite. The success of community portals for online video
viewing - the likes of YouTube, have already demonstrated the potential of
using web as a medium for delivering content programming online.
As a result, people get alternate mediums offering far more
flexibility to watch the same or similar content. They now have the choices to
mix any combination of content and context to create their own unique
experiences.
Content owner perspective: The content owners are now no longer required to depend
only upon the broadcasters for airing the content. They now have more options
in terms of using mobile and internet as the delivery medium for their content.
This further dilutes the significance of using "TV" as part of the content delivery
chain.
Finally the new
Avatar
The strategic shifts in focus and
strategies, highlighted above, have made the transformation on TV, all the more
compelling. There are many challenges that await the TV industry, as they gear
up to take on the competition in an evolved ecosystem. On one end, the
challenge for the TV service providers is to survive video cord-cutting and on
the other side, they really need to define an innovative roadmap for the TV,
giving it a new shape and definition. At the same time, it is equally important
and challenging for them to keep the advertisers continue with their TV based
spends, to sustain viability of the overall business model. The web as a
delivery platform for videos has already allowed ISPs and content providers to
cut a share out of the TV revenues.
Finally, we see that as part of the
resurrection efforts, TV industry is also aligning to take on the convergence
route for re-defining the TV viewing experience. As a result of it, we see the
following trends taking shape:
More and more "post-air" programming
is now being made available online, than earlier, by the TV service providers
Industry think-tanks are innovating
unique service bouquets, comprising of experience offerings across multiple
screens
OEMs are also making attempts to
roll out new devices that are "internet-enabled". These devices can connect
directly to the internet without any dependency on other peripherals.
There has been an equal interest
amongst the developer community as well to shell out apps that can make TV
viewing experience all the more interesting and engaging. Yahoo launched its TV
widgets last year which enable the viewers to watch weather updates, live stock
quotes etc as they watch their favorite shows on TV.
Advertising on the new avatar of
TV is another promising area that is getting a lot of attention. The evolving delivery platform for the TV makes targeted advertisements possible and enables
Ad telescoping as a new mode of delivering Ads.
I am sure this is only the beginning
of the trend and there are more interesting times ahead as the TV takes on a
new shape and evolved definition in this transformation. The efforts being
attempted will for sure contain the TV viewers and enhance the overall
experience, but the real test will be for the industry to leverage this
transformation effectively, to drive additional revenues. In the race to get
the first mover's advantage, building and sustaining a viable business model
around the connected services is all the more important.
It would be
interesting to see how effectively the TV service providers can align and map the stream of changes to the consumer behavior and leverage the new business models to drive home revenues.
Should Telcos replace, enhance, upgrade or outsource their billing requirements?
Technological advances, new marketing trends, growing customer expectations and changing operational methodologies is the new face of the telecom industry. However the recent global recession has compelled the service providers to cut short their budget on billing projects.. While some smaller Telcos cancelled the projects, some tier 1 operators either postponed the projects or found stop gap arrangements by bolting existing solutions. This short term vision kept the Telcos floating but resulting in huge losses. Can this be neglected? The answer is no? Why?
With ever evolving technology like increasing shift to packet based technologies, innovative prepaid services, near real time rating services, hybrid services (post paid and prepaid services combined), increased value added services (VAS) etc resulting in a significant increase in the data volumes. This move of Telcos to business models based around revenue sharing within the value chain means they need billing systems which can handle revenue sharing billing more effectively. The interconnect billing between Telcos has become increasingly important and, in some cases, can now represent up to 60 per cent or more of an operator's costs. Telcos cannot merely rely on data coming from partners' billing systems and their invoices. A small miscalculation by the billing party can make a difference of millions of dollars. Operators must look to implement their own interconnect billing systems to get control over the inter-operator settlements.
To cope with these requirements, I can think of the following strategies that the service providers can adopt: Upgrade existing billing systems to handle future requirements - Since this strategy implies building on old concepts and foundation, it won't offer the flexibility required for new age billing requirements. The small or medium operators who do not plan to launch frequent new products/services can adopt this approach. Replace existing billing system with new system - This would build the path for functions needed to run the business in future and reduce operational costs. However, this can be a costly, risky and lengthy process as the benefits will be reaped in the future. Operators having aggressive growth plans, risk taking capabilities and dream to roll out innovative products/services can adopt this approach. Integrate add-on functions or new modules on existing system - This requires either in-house development or engaging third party vendors. While this approach provides some flexibility and relatively quick results, it will increase the complexity of the system - particularly the integration challenge - and can add considerable processing overhead. Medium or large operators having existing plethora of home grown bespoke systems and posses technical expertise for in-house development or ready to outsource the new development to external vendor can adopt this approach. Outsourcing some or all billing functions or processes is a strategy adopted by start-ups who need to get systems in place quickly and for virtual Telcos, who do not have their own network but concentrate on customer relationships and who frequently lack the in house technical expertise to run billing systems themselves.
Increasing the customer facing staff efficiency by improving their billing knowledge
Billing issues usually seem tough to be handled for most of the customer facing staff. The customer facing staff who manages the day to day customer issues can easily handle any other queries but when it comes to billing issues, the standard FAQs will not help. It requires deep analysis and resolution and can not always be provided online. But the customer expectation is shattered when the representative informs the customer that he would raise a complaint and get back to him in a couple of days or as per the SLA of that billing complaint.
Listed below are the profiles of customer facing staff who may encounter a billing issue from Customer, in the order of no. of queries they may get on billing issues:
Contact center representative Back Office representative(Through Mails, messages and Chats) Showroom Representative Dealer showroom representative Field Sales representative Tele calling representative
The knowledge levels and awareness of billing differs drastically between each of these representatives - a back office representative for example can analyze the usage details with help of tools available and rework the bills for multiple months but a tele calling representative can hardly suggest a solution for a billing issue. Why the difference? It is mainly because of the training and access permission levels given to each of these representatives. A field representative will just have the hardcopy or softcopy invoice from the customer but not the access to even CRM systems. A contact center representative will have the access to bill and CRM but will not have any access to billing system. A Back office representative will have the access to billing, CRM and will also have multiple tools to rework the bill.
Hence the awareness, training and access permissions play a vital role in increasing the billing knowledge and efficiency of the customer facing staff.
These are just a few thoughts on increasing the customer facing staff efficiency by improving their billing knowledge; you are most welcome to add your further thoughts on this.
