Livewire

Pre-paid Services – Time to join the 21st Century?

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:31:25 +0000

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

Telecom convergence and customer centricity

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:51:36 +0000

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.

Changing billing practices and role of Network edge Billing

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:33:21 +0000

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.

Leveraging e-bill strategy in the Indian telecom market

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:47:25 +0000

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?

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:15:48 +0000

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.

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

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:22:05 +0000

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.

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

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:50:15 +0000

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.

Billing Transformation Programme – Part 1: Key Challenges

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:23:33 +0000

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

Addressing the challenges faced in telecom billing migration projects

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:25:46 +0000

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:

Billing as a Service

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:28:53 +0000

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.

Top 5 Challenges in Global Rollout of Billing System

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:18:53 +0000

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.

Telecom Bill in a Customer friendly format in Multi service scenario

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:33:24 +0000

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.

Billing and your Business Strategy

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:03:18 +0000

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.

Importance of introducing new Billing systems for Media and Entertainment companies

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:00:57 +0000

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.

Need for transforming billing systems

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:41:49 +0000

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.