Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog

With ever evolving telecommunications technology space and increasing customer demands, challenges have increased multifold for a Communications Service Provider to ensure delivery of effective and efficient "convergent" services. Pricing wars have forced CSPs  to introduce complex price plans with cross product discounting, unified bills, complex invoice formats etc that at times leave customers bewildered. Further, based on customer classifications by geography, market segments etc; it might happen that various services requested by the customer are handled by different internal departments whose applications may not necessarily be inter-connected with each other. All these internal processes and systems complexities keep the cost of operations high for CSPs and any deviations in these, impacts badly their performance parameters.

Now in this complex situation, if customers are not handled properly, there are high chances that they may get distracted at any point. It is observed that call volumes handled by call centers, queries resolved by billing department tend to explode whenever there are new promotions/plans launched in the market or when certain changes are done, that impact the invoice of customer. When customers are new, they usually take their own time to understand and follow/accept these situations. These new customers can be anyone who has been acquired recently OR an existing customer who has opted for some new service that resulted in change in his plans or usability of service. Every new customer has certain service requirements and expectations from CSPs and if for any reasons these are not met, he expects prompt response from the CSP. In case this does not happen, the customer's expectations fails and chaos starts. This situation may result in explosion of following activities and thereby impacting badly the Operational Efficiency:

• Total number of calls received in call centers from customers
• Number of queries resolved (clarifications, processing credits etc) by billing executives
• Handling change in existing plan or services, that may require involvement of multiple departments
• Tracking of follow-ups and updating customer on the issue status until it is resolved.
• Sending revised invoices, letters, handling customer dissatisfaction, churns etc.

The situation changes drastically when some proactive measures are taken by the CSPs to handle these conditions. In case of issues, the most important point is "Who initiates the call". If calls, contacts are initiated by customers, they become complaints, grievances resulting in above chaos.  BUT if these are initiated by CSPs, they become caring, supportive and assertive calls. Proactive efforts by CSPs at identified stages with an intention to explain or guide customers creates a high impact  as the  customer would be more aware and can discuss any issues upfront with the Customer Care Representative. It is a known fact that being fair with the customers helps in maintaining long lasting relationship with them and more so if this starts from the inception stage of customer acquisition, possibility of churn due to issues arising later is minimized in the customer lifecycle. Further if the CSP ensures that the customer is well educated with situation, processes, plans and benefits, representation on invoices etc, he will not contact the customer care or will have much lesser issues. This will definitely help in boosting the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and will directly impact Operational Efficiency Index.

This entire process is not as simple as it is stated here for many CSPs. This could be mainly because of the variety of Services offered, market segmentation, segregated departments, non-integrated IT systems (applications) handling different part of fulfillment process etc. Even with these internal challenges, efficient process should be implemented across boundaries so that customer interaction is seamless for the initial days to begin with. Following are some of the steps that can be part of babysitting the new customer:

• Welcome the new customer (Call initiated from Service Provider).
• Understand the requirement and help in filling all documents/formalities needed.
• Monitor key milestones and in case of changes, provide/take regular feedbacks.
• Get confirmation when desired services are activated. Resolve issues if any.
• Update about billing process, approximate amount, billing periods and due dates.
• After first Invoice is dispatched, call for explaining Invoice. Handle any concerns.
• Welcome customer again (after first bill) and assure him for best services Ahead

If possible, it should be emphasized that the customer is handled by a dedicated person during this babysitting period. After these steps are followed, it can be assured that unless there are any changes initiated by either by the Operator or Customer, which impacts either the service or billing, relationship will be smooth for rest of the service period.  It is seen that customers do not tend to leave a CSP until they are forced to. And if these customers are won by babysitting at every stage, they will be hard to loose, resulting in building stronger business with LOYAL CUSTOMERS.

Posted by Lalit Kumar Yerpude at 1:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the last article, I talked about the need for personalizing the customer experience. In this article, I want to take a deeper view on what the cable companies could do on the customer experience. 

Cable companies have traditionally been at the bottom bracket of Customer Satisfaction surveys.  Not much effort was put in improving customer experience since the consumer choice was fairly limited. The monopolistic nature of the business allowed the cable operators to get away with not so great customer service. Not any more! Like we discussed in the earlier article, the last 2 years have changed the landscape in the industry substantially. Growth has slowed down and reversed in some markets. Competition has emerged from Telco community who also have a lot of muscle. Innovation has created different kind of competition with the likes of Google voice, Hulu, Joost and others.

With the new reality, and the necessity of retaining existing customers and ensuring that new customer would prefer them over competition, the cable operators need to take a serious re-look at their overall customer experience strategy. In my view, there are 3 broad areas that they need to focus on. These areas also correspond to the experience touch points that the consumer have with the operator

1.       Sales and Marketing experience:

a)       Provide a simplified sales experience through the web: Most of the cable Operators need to improve their overall web experience and increase the sales through the web channel. Currently, the % sales that the cable operators are able to do through the web is much smaller than the overall Telco industry and very low as compared with the Retail industry. As the internet is becoming increasing prevalent and a preferred channel for buying,  improving overall sales through web becomes very important. These companies should look at the Amazon's of the world for inspiration. Online Retail industry has gone a long distance in making the overall buying experience simpler and richer. There is a lot that can be adopted.

b)       Anticipate the consumer needs and proactively recommend products and services: The cable companies have a unique advantage of already being in the homes of a large number of people in the country. The need for the operators is to use this advantage to understand and anticipate their customers better.  The cable companies are running a initiative called as Canoe which focuses around collecting usage data from the set top boxes and using BI engine on top of the data to create meaningful information. While there is a lot of doubt with Privacy concerns, my belief is that once they work through the initial hick-ups, this will provide a powerful tool for the operators to anticipate the consumer requirements and position the right products and services in time to meet their need. 

c)        Provide integrated sales to order fulfillment experience. Move towards flow through provisioning:  Even today, there is a lot of swivel chair that happens during the Order processing cycle. If the operators can invest in realizing the flow through provisioning for most of their products and services, it will go a long way in improving the initial customer experience and also help in faster revenue realization.

d)       Provide an opportunity to reach a real person on the phone in less than 60 seconds : One of the most frustrating experiences is to hold for an sales or customer service rep to come on the line. Many times, the wait can be as long as 30 minutes. There are many things the operators can do to reduce this. First is to make the alternate channels like the internet and self-service stronger and better. This will divert the traffic and reduce the load on the call centers. Also, they might have to look at increasing the agents by going to low cost location and balancing the cost, but improving the experience.

2.       Support Experience:  The challenge here is to move to be proactive from reactive, to be predictive from diagnostic, and to reduce the Time to Resolve for any support request the customer may have. There are many areas that the operators can focus on

a)       Use of knowledge management to get to the bottom of issues in less time: Thousands of service reps providing service and resolving customer issues are creating huge experiential knowledge that is not getting captured and re-used today. The need for the operators to put in places systems, processes and incentives for the service reps to record their service experiences in a re-usable form. The intelligence engine and UI behind this should provide a way for service reps and for consumers (through self -service) to be able to diagnose the problems quicker and find resolutions faster. This will not increase reduce the Opex cost but also improve customer experience significantly.

b)       Alternate channels like chat and video calls: With the advancement of technology, there are tools available today that can allow for Consumers to interact with the service reps through chat as well as video conversations. This needs to be leveraged as well. The backend for the Chat function can be moved to a low cost location to get better bang for the buck.

c)        Provide updates on when an outage might impact the consumer: There is a need for a major overhaul in the service assurance framework of the operators. While the operators do get alarms from network elements when they are not functioning well, there is a bigger need to be able to co-relate these alarms, identify network dependencies so that the downstream impact of a network element on a services and locations can be established. Eventually, the framework should be able to reach out to the impacted customers proactively, thereby preventing huge spike in service calls

d)       Predict failures on the network before they happen and put in measures to fix them: The ability of the network to predict failures sand thereby prevent possible outages is someone that the operators should aspire for. Again, a solid service assurance framework with a predictive model needs to be implemented.

e)       Provide a social community based expert help for product and services:  The operators need to implement community support functions like blogs, wikis and many others that are widely used today in other industries. These provide an additional source of help for the customers and also go a long way in improving the customer experience through very less investment. The Operator can themselves be connected on these networks and ensure that the questions are getting addressed.

f)        Provide the ability to view and analyze bills and recommend better plans:  Many of the customer calls to the call centers are around billing queries. The Operators can divert and reduce many of these calls by provide the consumer the ability to drill down into their bills and also provide the ability to analyze their bills. They should also implement a recommendation engine which can recommend better plans based on usage patterns.

g)       Be able to reach a real person on the Phone within 60 seconds: This is again the same as listed under point Sales Experience. Also, if the operators most of the things  listed in bullets in this section, the actual calls to call centers would drop significantly.

3.       Service Usage experience:

a)       Invest in Usability Experience of products and services: Along with creating a product or service which has good functionality, it is equally important to ensure that it very usable. Any easy way to understand this is to look at Apple products. They all bring in an excellent visual experience to the users as well as a simple and efficient way to use the products. Simplicity, efficiency, visual aesthetics, consistency, minimum steps, performance are all very important considerations, perhaps as important as the feature functions.

b)       Bring Multichannel capabilities: With the improvement in connectivity and data transfer speeds, home Television is just one of the many devices that the consumers want to view their content on.  The operators need to move fast to provide this multi screen experience to the customers.

c)       Competitive Feature functionality - Faster Innovation cycle: Big companies are facing increasing pressure from small, niche players who can bring innovation much faster to the market. Operators need to re-look at the their systems, processes, org structure and culture to  create a eco-system to respond faster to their user requirements. The need for quick innovation is relatively new to this industry and will require a major internal over haul to make it happen. 

d)       Convergence: Another way to fight the competition from niche players is to be able to create offerings which can combine the multiple products as a differentiated service. Services like Phone Ubiquity with one number or to be able to use the Home Phone from Mobile or Web, Video services available through Mobile and Internet, Universal Address book and Voice Mail that can sync up between different phones - home phones and mobiles, Caller ID on PC, TV and Mobile,  manage home phone and TV through Mobile, web; and many others.

Each of these areas can be further expanded with a lot more data and details, but that for another time.

Posted by Vinod Sonigara at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cable Companies in the US have long enjoyed being in a monopolistic market. Amongst themselves, they are a fraternity and mostly do not compete in each other's territory. Outside of them, there was traditionally no other service provider who could provide the bundle of voice, video and data to the consumers.  While they were competing with the Satellite Providers on video, the challenge was not very threatening to their growth.

However, over the last 2-3 years, certain shifts have happened in the economy and communications industry which have impacted or are threatening to impact the cable industry.

1.       The top 2 Telecom operators have entered into video space. ATT and Verizon have made their claim on the video programming distribution space and have entered with a lot of muscle. ATT through its U-verse offering and Verizon with its FIOS offering have captured market share and now have decent number of subscribers. Recent reports put the ATT video subs at 2.3 M and Verizon at 3 M. Compare that to Cable Vision at 3.0 M subs and Cable vision is the fifth largest Cable Operator. These operators have brought in fiber which promises to bring very high bandwidth to the consumer and also their innovation pace is faster than the Cable Industry

2.       The Rise of "Over the Top" video players. With the rapid growth in internet and the likes of U-tube Hulu, Joost and others, content is no longer distributed through the traditional TV network. There are many players in the market who provide access to content through internet. If this continues to be a trend, the advertizing revenue would also slowly shift to these new channels of content distribution. Also the negotiation power of the cable operator with content producers would also continue to reduce

3.       The rise of Skype, Google Voice kind of players which are enabling free phone service through VoIP are a certain threat to the Traditional Voice service which works on the subscription model. These again ride on the internet and as the Internet becomes ubiquitous on devices, would provide a no/low cost phone solution to the consumer.

4.       Cable Operators have always been in the bottom bracket on Customer Satisfaction in the Communications industry. Again, the shift in the market dynamics has made these companies sit up and re-look at customer experience with a bigger sense of urgency.

With the product differentiators fading away, the cable companies need to put on their thinking caps and take the battle to the enemy

In my opinion, there are 5 major areas that the cable companies should focus on to meet the challenge

1.       Shift to being service centric from product centric: Traditional business model in Cable has always focused around product subscription based revenue with fixed monthly billing to the consumer for different products like video, High speed internet and Home Phone. But with the products themselves becoming commodity, the need is to engage the customer with innovative services which may sometimes sit on top of multiple products like convergence based offerings, and could provide entertainment services, communication services and many others. The products should move into lower strata enabling a service creation layer on top of the products to bring faster innovation to the consumer. This would also make the companies more customer centric and hence more sticky to their consumers. To make this happen would also require the operators to structure themselves differently from their current product based structure.

2.       Instead of fighting "Over the top" become "Over the Top":  Providing customers with alternate channels to access the content including through internet, mobile devices and others would really go a long way in retaining the customers from moving to "over the top" providers. Customers would prefer hanging around with their existing service providers if they get the flexibility they need. Some of these initiatives would require deeper relationships with content providers and different business models. Initiatives like "TV Anywhere" by Cable Operators is a step in the right direction.

3.       Personalize the customer experience: With competition coming in from all sides and the consumer having plethora of choices, the only way to retain the customer is to personalize his/her experience with the operator.  The need of the hour is to understand the customer better and be proactive in reaching out to them before they feel the need to reach out.  Cable companies need to focus on Knowledge based customer service, customer analytics, customer profiling, creating multiple channels for enabling easy reach, being proactive in reaching out to customers on potential issues/outages. The customer should be at the center of all innovation and strategy.

4.       Get closer to Content: With alternate distribution channels for content becoming a reality, the cable operators are fast losing the stickiness on the video offerings and with that also lowering the negotiation powers with the content providers. Slowly but surely, the importance is moving to content owners from distribution channels. To capitalize on this, there is an increasing trend among Cable Operators to get more content ownership. The recent acquisition of NBC by Comcast is an excellent example of the Operator trying to protect the market by owning the content

5.       Faster innovation is the key: Like we discussed, cable business no longer enjoys a monopolistic setup and competition is slowly creeping in.  This has created a need for faster innovation. This is a bigger problem than it seems. Cable business, its organizational structure, systems, processes, culture have traditionally not been geared to fast innovation. Making this major shift would require major changes across the organization. This is already happening in varying degrees across the companies. We need to wait and see the results of this in the coming years

These are interesting times ahead for the Cable Industry. While the threats are real, so are the opportunities.

Posted by Vinod Sonigara at 3:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We all would have read extensively about B2B or B2C buzz words, how about Machine2Machine (M2M) and its potential revenue opportunities? Is it not interesting to get more insights on this new buzz word? Through this blog, I would like to share with the readers some information I could gather on M2M.

M2M is communications networking of remotely held devices. M2M Technology allows exchange of information without human intervention and covers range of technologies & applications which connects devices to back-end IT infrastructure.

Newer developments in M2M Technologies are opening up incredible revenue growth for Communication providers. Real time & anywhere access to data from remote machines or devices is changing the way business operates. Major Communication providers are making significant investment to upgrade infrastructure to tap potential M2M markets over the next 5 years not only to improve efficiency & bring cost reduction in their business, but also for additional revenue generation and improved customer satisfaction. Technology changes and cut throat competition are driving industry interest in M2M cutting across domains like Retail, Logistics, Transportation, Utilities, Communications, etc.

M2M is increasingly seen as a growing technology solution that will help to improve customer service & loyalty, opening revenue growth opportunities, optimized utilization of infrastructure and reduced cost through utilization of real-time information.

Standard BSS applications available in market across industry verticals might not fully meet business model & system requirements for M2M. CSP's will need to develop unique business operating model & processes powered by next gen OSS/BSS Infrastructure and Billing applications to tap the potential revenue from M2M. In order to meet M2M needs, billing systems should be geared up to support low  ARPU business models providing scalability & flexibility for volumes fluctuations, real time charging & billing capabilities to support a complex business model.

M2M space is worth to watch for next 2 - 3 years with product vendors & service providers getting focused to ripe benefits from untapped growth potential from yet to mature M2M market.

Posted by Shivakumar Ramachandran at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It will be no news to you, if I say, all operators across a Geo are compared using the parameter ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). The scale of ARPU is different in various geographies and any operator with subscription based business will be able to make out their position compared to that of the market with this indicator.

ARPU is the reflection of Operator's ability to market their products, increase the subscriber base and at the same time making revenues out of it. At a highlevel, various sets of parameters affect the ARPU of an operator. I would like to dig a little into the various functions an operator would have and check how and what impact would a Billing System bring to the operator's ARPU.

A quick thought tells us that Billing system can be the main source of customer satisfaction if it is error prone in a prepaid scenario and reacts fast to the changes in market scenario in a post paid case. I would love to see how the prepaid errors are proportional to the Customer Churn and impacting revenue and hence ARPU. But in theory, if the prepaid engine fails to carry the customer recharge request to success, or ends/doesn't allow the customer call even the customer has a good balance, it is a direct impact on the business and before the operator realizes, there could be a customer churn, loss of revenue and sharp decline in ARPU.

For a postpaid scenario, there could be many case studies. I can quickly think of a couple of them. If a product launched is over sold by more than 5 or 10 times beating the Operator expectations, it obviously clogs the entire BSS stack and if the billing system is not scaled enough to handle to load, there could be a potential revenue leakage leading to a lower ARPU. A second case study could be like this. In the Telecom world its all competition. How well one places his products in the market and how quick it happens is all that matters. A billing system will be expected to turn around quickly in terms of configuration of new plans and products to be launched. This will also have a direct impact on Subscriber growth and Operators revenue there by impacting the ARPU.

Do you think there is something more to this?

Posted by Prasanth Kumar at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever since I've been involved in the billing, I've seen vendors trying to break out of their initial market into other industry verticals.  I can't recall anyone managing to make themselves a dominant player in more than one domain.  Why can't the same billing system be used for Telcos, banks, supermarkets, water companies, car rentals, credit card companies, publishers etc

Domain knowledge could be an inhibitor; specialist terms and requirements do exist in different industries.  However, with flexible data model it should be possible to map different business models and terminology into a billing system.  Indeed, many vendors claim this attribute and I can certainly vouch that this is the case in the systems I am aware of.  There may be an element of a communications and credibility gap, but these can be overcome by adding domain expertise to technical excellence.

Size and complexity.  Historically the ability the cross industry could be constrained by the ability to process the sheer volumes of transactions.  However in 2010, vastly more powerful hardware exists and vendors have spent years optimising performance to take advantage of faster CPUs and huge increases in available RAM.  It should be possible to demonstrate acceptable performance for any industry.  We have run proof of concepts for customers demonstrating scalability far exceeding their industry norms.

So readers, what do you think the reasons are?

Posted by Ian Williams at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I wanted to follow up my last blog post on Mobile Payments with my thoughts on how the Mobile Payments ecosystem is evolving and the need for all the players to come together to get it off the ground.

Today's digital consumers are willing to handle most of their transactional needs themselves through self serve applications. This is evident from their adoption of Mobile Apps for doing just about anything in their everyday life. The ubiquity of mobile devices coupled with the advent of ePayment instruments has resulted in the convergence of Wireless industry and Financial Services industry with a potential to transform the way financial services are delivered to the consumers.

Given the market opportunity and the consumers' willingness to adopt, there is no doubt that mobile device is poised become a very integral part of consumer's daily transactions. Many players have emerged in this space and are making major investments in an attempt to cement their position and benefit from this new growth engine - Banks, Credit Issuers, MNOs, OEMs and other Technology providers.

Today, mobile payments technology has evolved and has reached a stage where it can support large scale deployments. But the reality is that we are seeing most of the growth in this space occurring in the emerging markets like Africa and Asia. Growth in these markets has largely been driven by the need and relevance of such services where even banking has not yet reached the masses and in some places mobile devices present the only way to financially transact. Hence we see a huge push from players and uptake from consumers.

When it comes to developed nations, the story is different. The Mobile Payments market is evolving relatively slowly in these markets compared to the developing markets. One of the main reasons for this is because these markets have fairly advanced banking setup. Amongst countries in Europe and N. America, banking services has already reached the masses. There are extensive banking networks already available for the consumers. These countries have achieved the so called "financial inclusion" to a greater extent across the strata of the population. Prevalence and wide spread adoption of other channels for making financial transactions have also contributed to this slow growth. Hence enabling financial transactions via Mobile is seen as more of a value added service or a luxury for the consumers. Hence a lot of doubt exists amongst industry players about the adoption of such services by the consumers, the value that can be realized and hence the extent to which these would be successful.

Moreover, even with the technology evolving, the growth of mobile payments has lagged because of the inability of the ecosystem players to build a reliable business model that is compatible with everyone in the value chain. A majority of the effort and investments that have been put into this space by Banks, Credit Issuers and MNOs have been to deploy market trials and pilots. But none of them have clearly emerged with a successful business model that can be taken mass market and a model in which every player has a value that can be realized.

We have been hearing about so many pilot initiatives in these markets driven by diverse players. Most of these initiatives are closed with participation from a limited set of players like one bank, one credit issuer, one technology vendor or one MNO. Such a closed model will succeed in the emerging markets owing to the need for such services. However, in the developed markets, there has to be a model (and an ecosystem) that is more "general" and more "open" which drives multi-party participation. Unwillingness on the part of the players to shed their "competing interests" and collaborate to come up a mutually beneficial model is the primary reason behind why the developments in the mobile payments space has been a laggard in the developed nations.

Everyone agrees that barriers exist for mass market mobile payments initiatives in developed countries. And everyone also realizes that there is a fantastic opportunity that exists in this space and there is a lot of revenues to be made. Unless the diverse players come together, build an open ecosystem in which everyone can participate and benefit, and aggressively make a push to educate consumers, the developed nations are going to continue to lag behind in the Mobile Payments space.

What are your thoughts?  I would like to hear about your observations and learnings in this space?

Posted by Sandeep Chandrasekar Seshadri at 2:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the past few years, the global telecom industry has changed dramatically. Developed markets have become saturated, business models are converging, and product offerings have grown more complex as operators compete to offer customers attractive bundles of services. So operators have focused their IT agendas on consolidating and upgrading their customer-facing capabilities, to reduce customer churn and attract new customers. CXOs are experiencing firsthand role of the billing process in supporting new products and pricing models, bringing them to market quickly, improving revenue capture, and reducing costs. In a sample, Booz & Co conducted, 71% of CTO/CTOs stated Billing Transformation is one of their top 3 priorities, where as 22% said it's of lower priority and only 7% said it's of no priority. For the year 2010-2011, 82% of these transformation programs are in strategy & planning phase where as 18% of transformations are under execution.

Drivers behind Billing moving to top of the IT agenda at many telecom operators are increased product & pricing complexities, time-to-market, and opex & business risks of legacy systems. The approach to take in billing transformation will depend on operator's business requirements, technology strategy, and economic benefits to be realized. They can either take incremental evolutionary or aggressive revolutionary approach.

Above market conditions changed supplier landscape as players repositioned themselves to build comprehensive convergent billing capabilities. Traditional Billing package vendors such as Amdocs, Comverse and Convergys enhanced their product lines to include enhanced online charging capabilities. NEMs such as Ericsson are acquiring postpaid vendors to bring convergent capabilities. And global IT software vendors like Oracle (acquired Portal), SAP (acquired Highdeal) entered from familiar CRM, ERP, and BI territories to have comprehensive BSS portfolios. However market remains fragmented with Amdocs being only player with sizable market share.

Factoring following key decision drivers, operators should position themselves for one of the four very different strategies i.e. Stabilization, Stepwise differentiation, Best of suite, Lean COTS (SAAS).

1.       Growth

2.       Product Portfolio

3.        Product Integration

4.       Service & Support

5.       Pricing

6.       Functional Fitment

7.       Functional Flexibility

8.       Operational Stability

9.       Scalability

10.   Financial Base

In conclusion, executives must balance hard-core business requirements, technology realities, economic benefits, and distinguish careful analy­sis from market hype.

Posted by Shree Kodavatiganti at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)