3 Outstanding reasons for failure of Billing Transformations
Telcos undertake billing transformations for various reasons like scalability, fitment, future-focus and time-to-market, as mentioned by multiple bloggers in this site. They have to understand that a Billing System is the heart of their BSS stack. Billing also demands online integration with multiple components of BSS stack. Having noted these, we can conclude with the below 3 areas as the outstanding reasons for the failure of a large billing transformation program:
- In many of the programs I have worked on, the integration with CRM system was the bottleneck. CRM will handle the transactions very well internally but when it comes to pushing these transactions forward to Billing, there would be numerous issues to be addressed and carefully solved. Any small issue in the design stage could easily get magnified by the time testing kick starts.
- Of late, operators have become very creative and to woo their end-customers, they are going any far to come up with products that are nearly impossible to implement in today's market-leading billing packages. I would call these as futuristic requirements, which will be the next reason we could look at. There are these innovative requirements which combine a prepaid and postpaid offering into one and give a very interesting hybrid offer to the customer. Before the operators jump on implementing such products, it is important that the billing package is well analyzed for its fitment, create POCs, take a GO/NO-GO decision and proceed accordingly.
- Billing system cannot work independently without the customer data. Customer Data Migration from legacy to the new billing system has to be an astounding success for making the entire billing transformation work. Data Migration is not given the right importance most of the times and even not planned well in many programs. I have witnessed many programs where the core billing configuration and customization for all functional requirements is complete but data is not loaded due to various issues that include quality of input data, ETL discrepancies and finally incorrect volumetric analysis.
It is important that Telcos give due consideration for all the major issues when they embark on billing transformations and control the program from being termed as a failure. What in your experience is the prime culprit for making a billing transformation program fail?
Read my next blog for some best practices on how to avoid such failures and take home the 10 commandments for successful Billing Transformations.
