FTS, a global provider of billing, customer care and policy control solutions for communication, content and service providers, today announced that it has partnered with Steria France to create the "Steria Agile Billing" solution enabling a new relationship between operators and their customers that goes beyond 'simple' billing. The solution addresses developments in the telecommunications industry that have required operators to improve their pricing and billing processes to include more intelligence and flexibility in order to provide increasingly customized services to the consumer.
With the growing range of access technologies (3G, DSL, fiber optic, etc.), content services (music, video, games, applications, etc.) and billing models (on demand, a la carte, subscription, and even user-defined hybrid models): the era of simple billing is now a thing of the past.
To support this market shift, Steria has partnered with billing and policy control specialist FTS Ltd to create and launch the "Steria Agile Billing" solution, which will allow the service providers' marketing team to fully convey the richness and complexity of their service offering, with minimal rollout times and no technical constraints. The joint solution puts customer preferences at the heart of service providers' offering, affording them the flexibility for solutions to be precisely customized, therefore improving customer experience while optimizing revenues.
The solution created by Steria and FTS provides operators with a next-generation billing platform that is agile and intuitive, allowing the rapid launch of new offerings in line with the complexity of the constantly changing service provider environment. Marketing teams can now independently configure new services, new offerings or attractive special promotions in record time.
"Our solution makes the customer central to the billing system by monitoring their usage in real time", commented Nir Asulin, VP Operations, FTS. "An extremely intuitive modelling system, the DO TreeTM, allows the marketing function to build pricing rules and models which take into account each customer's usage patterns and the richness of the choices they make. We are very pleased with this partnership with Steria, as the complementary nature of our companies allows us to broaden our future prospects together."
"With Steria's expertise in the telecommunications market and our familiarity with the business challenges facing this sector, we can now provide a next-generation billing offering that addresses the difficulties faced by the market which we witness first-hand," said Thierry Gohon, Director of Telecoms Development, Steria France. "Testing a new offering, attracting a specific target audience to a new type of service, even rewarding certain behaviours, 'Steria Agile Billing' provides the responsiveness operators need to meet their major business challenges: pricing, customization and time to market. These challenges are central to the transformation projects we are currently conducting for the major players in a constantly changing market."