Following sustained advancement in mobile, internet and wireless technology over recent years, communications service provider (CSP) find themselves faced with continuingly evolving pressures and challenges as they battle to satisfy an intensifying demand for rich new services amongst customers. Drew Rockwell, CEO of MDS, a provider of enterprise customer experience management solutions, looks at how new business enablement models in BSS could help CSPs to reduce their costs and better serve their customers.
Following sustained advancement in mobile, internet and wireless technology over recent years, communications service provider (CSP) find themselves faced with continuingly evolving pressures and challenges as they battle to satisfy an intensifying demand for rich new services amongst customers. Drew Rockwell, CEO of MDS, a provider of enterprise customer experience management solutions, looks at how new business enablement models in BSS could help CSPs to reduce their costs and better serve their customers.
Faced with a number of challenges, including increasing mobile data and internet usage, converging networks and services and, most of all, falling ARPU for voice in the face of intense competition, the priorities for operators are to find ways that they can improve operational efficiencies whilst ensuring they can quickly roll- out innovative new services, all with the objective of driving customer experience and business growth.
For CSPs looking for ways to meet these challenges, the answer lies with operations and business support systems (O/BSS). Often regarded as the necessary backhaul to provision frontline innovation, O/BSS should be at the very heart of CSPs’ plans for business growth. It is the next iteration of BSS in particular however that will enable operators to quickly roll-out new services without having to completely overhaul their systems.
The advent of new generation BSS
The problem faced by operators is that they are constrained by high numbers of legacy systems in their backend. This leads to high volumes of product, service and functional silos, meaning that there is no ‘single view’ of customers or services and, as a result, increased customer experience complexity for the CSPs. As the evolution of the communications services industry continues, new business models will need to be supported by a greatly enhanced BSS layer that sits between the customer experience and back-office O/BSS in the CSP’s IT estate.
For CSPs looking to adopt the billing transformation model, the investment required can introduce long term demands across their business, including costs that can reach into the high millions, time that is measured in years, ever-increasing complexity and, ultimately, the risk that the programme may fail to deliver, as many others have done. For the CSP that has already committed to billing transformation it is even more critical to adopt BSS enhancements that introduce benefits in the short to medium term, helping to drive down costs and respond more efficiently to variable customer demands.
In order to address these issues, decision makers need to evaluate alternative options that can overlay and coordinate existing systems quickly while leaving existing IT assets in place; otherwise they risk being left behind in a continually evolving marketplace.
Transitioning past, present and future
Transformation takes years, so CSPs need to find ways in which they can migrate customers in a staged approach to complement the introduction of new services as they emerge. Done at the appropriate time, this means they will be able to manage customer, partner and stakeholder relationships in the most efficient way possible.
New generation BSS will provide CSPs with a layer that sits over existing systems and with provision for new services that will in turn provide a single view of each individual customer’s products and services, empowering them to manage their services on their terms. A unified layer keeps an existing O/BSS asset base in place while unifying the back end data sources and business processes. It’s all about providing a single, unified platform that offers a single view of the customer and enhances the customer experience.
In the future, this flexibility will become more prevalent as new services are introduced that existing system assets will have to integrate with. In the next few years alone we can begin to see suppliers and partners emerging in cloud, healthcare, utilities, as well as the continuing and fragmented rise of digital content provision. New generation BSS is about making services and networks more unified and selling into market segments, such as business, with pace and agility.
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Drew Rockwell: Providing a single, unified platform that offers a single view of the customer is critical.
