With an increasing number of applications and services to provision and bill for, operators need flexible BSS that can provide a single customer view across all services, says?Gabriel Matsliach
In the increasingly competitive telecommunications market, success is no longer about identifying and delivering just the one "killer" application. In fact, there may be many "killer apps". Success has become about getting new services – and bundle of services – to market before your competition. In today's changing telecom environment, there are many moments of opportunity, those with the best market agility will capture the value of those moments and win. First to market can be a differentiator. Agility and responsiveness are what demonstrate innovative, forward thinking to your customers – and what helps to capture profits from early-adopting trendsetters.
Subscribers – consumer and business – are increasingly savvy when it comes to anticipating the next wave of services. Most importantly, they hear the hype and don't want to wait. If you describe something as "coming soon", a need to wait might drive a subscriber to another operator. The number of subscribers who are "digital natives" is also increasing, raising the bar on service expectations, while at the same time opening up new opportunities to interact with your customers. With these in mind, shortening time to market and leveraging your BSS (business support systems) as a strategic marketing tool, are essential to success. And of course, all this must be done in an efficient manner.
Speed to Revenue
Accelerating time to revenue starts with the basics – systems that deliver comprehensive monetization, i.e. the ability to rate, charge and bill for any service and support any type of payment mode. This ability is fundamental to creating the multi-service bundles – along with cross-product promotions – that customers demand. Moving beyond the basics, a marketing-driven product catalog will ease the actual creation of the bundle – quickly and efficiently define, test and launch new service promotions and bundles – across multiple channels.
This single product catalog is possible only if your BSS is unified around a single data model. A single data model also means that all your subscribers and accounts – prepaid, postpaid, hybrid (converged), consumer, business, any line of business – are supported by a complete customer view accessible by every touchpoint. This enables you to give a consistent customer experience across the web, call center, and device, strengthening loyalty. Nothing will drive customers away faster than the frustration of an operator that doesn't deliver as promised. A single data model provides a "single source of truth" for marketing, self-service, customer care, ordering, billing and financial management, which is absolutely essential to ensure a top-notch customer experience.
The second way to accelerate time to revenue is to ensure that the growth and evolution of your business is not constrained by system limitations; a need for major infrastructure overhaul in order to adapt to change is a system limitation. Certainly, you need the confidence that your BSS will gracefully handle huge increases in transaction volumes, new markets, or new services. A system that can be deployed in one manner today – tailored to your unique business needs – and then be expanded over time to support changing business needs or to address legacy migration issues gives the utmost confidence of its ability to adapt and grow. This flexibility translates into increased business agility, including faster time-to-market.
Active Customer Management
Today's consumers have more ways to communicate and be entertained. They use more services and have complex demands relating to their accounts. They're looking for family plans, relevant offers, personalized packages, and control over spending – including multiple identities and balance transfer.
In this world, the ability to manage your customers in a real-time, interactive manner, that is consistent across any touch point (web, call center, IVR, device) – and accessible "on the go" – is a must. This concept of active customer management is essential to maintaining customer satisfaction, generating interest in new offerings and increasing customer spending.
Personalized promotions and notifications applied in real-time can increase usage and enhance the customer experience, turning your BSS into a marketing tool. Customer loyalty programs are easy to implement when you know what your customers are doing in real-time. Leverage your customers' usage data to offer promotions that will keep them coming to you for more. Take this a step further and allow customer to tailor their own service plans or offers, for the ultimate in satisfaction.
These scenarios assume interaction over a mobile device. They also assume self-service capabilities – over the web as well as over IVR or through the device. Self-service is a proven way to encourage positive and constructive subscriber interaction of all subscribers – consumer or enterprise – increasing possibilities for cross-sell and up-sell. Self-service that is based on the same data model as the underlying billing and ordering system brings unique advantages in that the customer's self-service experience is consistent with his experience across all other operator touch points. This increases both customer satisfaction and operator efficiency.
An Eye on the Bottom Line
Equally important to growth is the need to keep costs down. Efficient implementation plays a major role in reducing time and costs. When a billing and active customer management solution is developed as a comprehensive whole – i.e., a single product solution – and doesn't require customization or extensive integration during the deployment process, deployment time and costs are predictable and manageable.
Having a single system to handle customer management, ordering, and convergent charging for all service and payment types, brings savings in the areas of training and operations. Furthermore, coordinated customer order orchestration and flow-through provisioning ensure service delivery accuracy and tighten order-to-cash cycles.
And finally, the ability to monitor usage and balances in real-time (even for postpaid subscribers) is a new tool for financial risk management that helps ensure that while capturing the moment of opportunity, you are not over-exposing your business.
Today's Operator Reality
While it seems clear that most legacy infrastructure is ill-equipped to address the challenges of today's market, it is also true that each operator has unique needs and priorities with regards to legacy system migration, and some may include business transformation objectives as part of the migration process.
A common thread throughout the endless variety of strategies, plans and requirements for such a significant task is flexibility. Operators need flexibility in both their billing and customer management solution, and in a migration approach. When a solution is built as a single software base that can be deployed in a variety of ways to meet individual business needs, it delivers that required flexibility. It is only when all the pieces are derived from the same software base that a multi-phase approach is possible since each piece can be deployed incrementally at the most strategic time. It is only when a solution is engineered from the bottom up as a unified platform, rather than patched together from multiple vendors, architectures, technologies or development methodologies, that the cost and time-to-market advantages of true convergence are realized.
Operators need a BSS solution that can support prepaid and postpaid modes and can be evolved to support hybrid (converged) accounts. They will benefit profoundly from scenarios where real-time credit control can be added to postpaid deployments; and customer care can be added to prepaid deployments. These are the kind of options that allow an operator to reach business goals in a changing market.
Working with a field-proven vendor in the delivery of charging, billing and customer care solutions to telecom providers around the world is key in achieving success. The most optimal partner has expertise in both in-network and IT systems and deployment. These are the two critical areas of expertise for success in the "always on" world. Operators should work with a partner who has expertise in both areas and can therefore determine the appropriate phasing and implementation timetable, tailored to enable each operator to achieve strategic goals at its own pace. Of course, a proven track record in legacy system migration is also essential.
Capture the Opportunity
Your business is changing, and changing quickly. That's why you need an active customer management and billing solution built to help you accelerate revenue growth – efficiently. You need the agility to capture new revenue opportunities and adapt to changing markets. At the same time you need to reduce complexity and keep your operations efficient. With the right BSS system, and the right deployment partner, decisions you make today won't limit your choices tomorrow, enabling you to capture every moment of opportunity the new world offers you.
About the author: Gabriel Matsliach, Ph.D, is General Manager – BSS Line of Product, Comverse.