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Telecom convergence and customer centricity

2010-03-09T05:51:36Z

The maxim about the customer being king has never been as relevant as in today’s telecom environment. To win the battle for growth, Communication Services Providers (CSPs) are gearing their cultures toward putting customers’ needs first. CSPs are becoming customer-centric, molding operations to answer client needs and offering an unmatched communications experience to foster loyalty and reduce customer churn. Couple this with the converged landscape of telecom industry, customer centricity in a converged telecom set-up has the potential to be a game changer.]]> Convergence of services is revolutionizing the communications industry, driving the investment of billions of dollars on network and service development efforts by CSPs. Convergence offers CSPs a tremendous business opportunity by allowing them to exceed customer expectations through state-of-the-art, personalized communication services. Thus, the CSPs are keen to grow and retain their customer base and increase average revenue per user (ARPU) by rolling out next-generation products and services.

With customer centricity driving all key activities in the management of a customer’s Life Cycle, what are the key areas the CSPs need to focus on? Here are a few:

· Understand customer needs better (location, context and situation)

· Provide the customers the flexibility they require

· Give them the control to manage the services they use (with a customer-centric view).

The need of the hour is to recognize the strategic imperative of "customer centricity" as it holds the key to unlock the customer lifetime value!

Changing billing practices and role of Network edge Billing

2010-03-05T18:33:21Z

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.

Leveraging e-bill strategy in the Indian telecom market

2010-02-25T12:47:25Z

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.

Is Mobile App Store Fragmentation here to stay?

2010-02-24T07:15:48Z

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.

]]> It’s Web-based not native Apps!

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?

The coming flood of connected devices! Are the carriers ready?

2010-02-21T01:22:05Z

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?

Leveraging ‘Billing’ in the multi-party multi-service context

2010-02-16T10:50:15Z

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.

Billing Transformation Programme – Part 1: Key Challenges

2010-02-12T17:23:33Z

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

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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’

Addressing the challenges faced in telecom billing migration projects

2010-02-11T16:25:46Z

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.

Billing as a Service

2010-02-09T07:28:53Z

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. ]]> The case for "Billing as a Service" is much more engaging for Tier-2 and Tier-3 Telecom operators who can kick-off their services without a heavy upfront investment in acquiring on-premise Enterprise Software. The key business benefits include enhanced flexibility and agility in meeting the demands of business, low maintenance costs, quick scalability, faster speed to market. The biggest challenge is in the form of data security and regulatory compliance. Other challenges include vendor lock-in and adherence to QoS SLAs. While embracing the "Billing as a Service" model, the telecom operators would need to transform their business processes as well as define the metering and charge-back models. For example, the call records may not be visible on a real time basis on the customer self-care but in the form of 12-hour feeds. However the customer can see the overall balance on a real-time basis.

So all in all, "Billing as a Service" presents itself as a promising cost-reduction and efficiency enhancing option for Tier-2 and Tier-3 telecom operators. A few vendors have already taken the lead and brought out comprehensive offerings in the market. Hoping to see the action spicing up in this space in 2010 and beyond!

Top 5 Challenges in Global Rollout of Billing System

2010-02-09T06:18:53Z

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Telecom Bill in a Customer friendly format in Multi service scenario

2010-02-05T10:33:24Z

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.

Billing and your Business Strategy

2010-02-03T16:03:18Z

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.

Importance of introducing new Billing systems for Media and Entertainment companies

2010-01-28T09:00:57Z

Media and Entertainment industry is growing at a very fast pace with its extensive adoption in our lives. Whether its entertainment, information or media services, especially digital media, service provider’s aim is to provide easily available and affordable content to the end users in an efficient manner. To thrive in the current competitive environment, it is imperative for service providers to constantly increase interaction with its customers, retain existing customers and evolve new channels for revenue generation. ]]> With the existing IT landscape, challenges that most media and entertainment providers are facing today are:
 Continuously differentiating and introducing new pricing models to combat customer churn as customers are rapidly switching service providers
 Retaining customer loyalty by ensuring accuracy and transparency in customer touch points such as bill details, plan details etc.
 Multiple partners required to support varied services which necessitates robust partner settlement mechanism to build a stronger buyer-seller partnership
 Bringing in transformation into the system and indentify additional revenue streams
 Legacy systems’ inflexibility to adapt to changing consumer needs
 Need for huge infrastructure and investment to provide premium services

To overcome these challenges and stay ahead of competition, the service providers are embarking on their transformation journey to introduce modular, robust COTS products either by upgrading or replacing legacy system for better alignment of their processes, to accurately rate concurrent services in real-time. An important aspect of this transformation journey lies in adopting a robust, efficient and transparent COTS billing system which would:
 Provide flexibility to scale operations and add additional business / service lines while reducing operational costs
 Accurately charge the customers and hence generate revenues for the service providers
 Increase customer satisfaction by providing customer self service options and quicker accesses to their accounts.
 Provide enhanced operational transparency to change the customer billing needs and requests
 Migrate customers quickly to new or better plans, retaining customer loyalty

Thus implementing of a real-time, value-based and transaction-oriented rating and billing systems becomes necessary not only for supporting new services but also enable them to create new revenue streams via flexible convergent services targeted to suit varied market segments.

Need for transforming billing systems

2010-01-20T16:41:49Z

To cope with stiff competition, rapidly dwindling profit margins and ever increasing operational costs, Communication Service Provides (CSPs) are looking at various options to cut down costs, generate additional revenue from existing business models/systems and reduced lead time for new services’ launch.]]> & deployment windows and high maintenance and support costs. Also discrete billing systems maintained for different business units for different product lines lead to a fragmented customer view.

CSPs can significantly reduce these costs by rationalizing and consolidating their existing legacy billing systems into a single new generation high performance, scalable, flexible and SOA based billing solution from leading COTS product vendors like Oracle, Comverse, Amdocs, Intec etc. These new generation COTS products provide:
§ Quick implementation on account of comprehensive out of the box functionalities and hence shorter lead time to market
§ 3G service offerings
§ Online/ customer self customized services to end-users
§ Integrated view of customer billing data
§ Agile & flexible Product catalogue features
§ New revenue growth engines
§ Real time rating & charging
§ Convergent billing
§ Enriched bill presentation features
§ On-line payments processing
§ Enhanced customer dispute handling

A rationalized and consolidated next generation billing system will enable service providers to incorporate process improvements, gain market differentiation, enhanced customer experience, achieve cost savings, generate new growth, gain better ROI on infrastructures, shared services and maintain agile work force who have access to next generation billing solution and cutting edge technologies to work upon. Also by investing and capitalizing on the new generation billing system, service providers can outsource non-core activities of systems maintenance and focus on their core competencies.

Convergence in Telecom billing

2010-01-20T04:11:41Z

With changing consumer lifestyles, continuously evolving in providing new services has become the mantra for Communication service providers (CSPs) to sustain stiff competition. Traditional stovepipe billing systems support either voice, data, mobile or video services at a time. Investing in individual billing systems for each service type is not an optimal proposition from an operational as well as maintenance perspective. Also from a customer’s perspective, they are keen to opt for bundled services which include triple play (voice, data and video) and quadruple play (adding mobility to voice, data and video), instead of buying single individual services.

]]> Broadly speaking, convergent billing is an integration of all service charges onto a single customer invoice, by creating a unified view of all the services provided to the customer and a single-point customer care. Thus Convergence in the billing and Customer care platforms provides two fold benefits to the customers as well as the CSPs as follows:

Customer Gain:
• Eliminates the need of multiple providers for different services.
• Single bill for different services makes payment and other processing simpler and faster.
• Cross-service discounts i.e. eligibility for preferential pricing if multiple services are ordered.
• Single point of contact to resolve the billing problems/queries for any of the subscribed services.

CSP Gain:
• Opportunity to become a one-stop shop for multiple services, by offering triple and quadruple plays.
• Improve CSR’s operational efficiency and flexibility by making unified view of each customer available on a single click.
• Convergent billing enables multi-service packaging and pricing, whereby existing customers are lured to add new services and new customers are attracted by innovative bundled services. It enables CSPs to easily view the big picture by spotting cross-service relationships and buying patterns that spell out new opportunities helping them in adding new services to differentiate in this competitive market.

Thus with convergent services as part of CSP’s marketing strategy, the success of their business model will depend to a great extent on the implementation of cutting edge billing and customer care platforms.