Real-time charging enables the real-time customer experiences the market demands. It also enables elimination of bill shock, allows for two-sided business models and improves the customer experience, writes Jaco Fourie.
The communications industry is moving more quickly today than ever before. But to understand where we are going, let’s look back to the 1990s, to understand where we are coming from. Mobile phone uptake was slow back then, it was expensive and as a result it became a product for the affluent few. It took important innovation to change this and our world has not been the same since. It was the beginning of a new business model, one that enabled differentiation and made it possible to sell mobile telephony in a new way. A way that was accessible to the mass market while at the same time manageable and profitable for operators. The business model was called prepaid. Real-time charging was the enabling
technology that made it possible for the operator to control their credit exposure, while enabling the masses to get access to mobile telephony and control their spending. Looking forward, we have started the journey towards the networked society, where everything that will benefit from being connected will be connected. We envision that by 2020 we will have 50 billion connected devices that will connect more or less every human being, improving their quality of life, the way we do business and enriching the societies we live in. This will create an immense amount of new opportunities for operators – new business models, new value chains and new demands from users on the quality of experience they receive.
We are once again seeing the need for deploying technology to create and support today and tomorrow’s opportunities. Today, the industry is buzzing with questions like:
1. How to prevent bill-shock?
2. How to monetise Over The Top (OTT) traffic?
3. How to address the low spenders?
4. How to improve customer experience?
5. How to grow mobile broadband subscriptions?
The answer? It requires online data and realtime processes. It is no longer sufficient to use offline Support Systems (BSS/OSS) processes such as those primarily used by the operators to run their businesses today. They must transform
to business-enabling online systems that are an essential part of an operator’s product offerings and their relationship with customers and partners. A transformation that will make it possible to, for example:
1. Eliminate bill-shock
2. Enable a two sided business model
3. Create differentiated and segmented offers
4. Empower sales and customer support staff
5. Grow the business and profit
Let’s examine mobile broadband as an example of how the industry is changing. Currently we are experiencing a strong uptake of mobile broadband around the world. Thismeans, once again, we have come to a point where we need to rethink existing business models. Today’s approach is dominated by plans where the differentiation is primarily through differently sized megabyte or gigabyte bundles with varied monthly fees. These are not individual enough to capture the
true mass market and address the needs of all the emerging segments. There are some who want or need to have access to everything and are more than happy to pay for a premium plan. Others will prefer paying only for selected services that fit their lifestyle. Many users on volume packages have difficulty understanding how much they have used monthly and operators have difficulties upselling to users when they reach their limits. So what happens if more targeted service
offerings are introduced? How will users understand what their plans allow them to do? How will operators be able to create up-sell? Real-time for all users and all services will be the foundation for success. The key customer touch points can mprove the customer experience when leveraging real-time information and real-time decisions:
• Find – First of all, the offerings need to be easy to find. Not only in stores and on the street corner, but also on the web. This means promoting to your existing customers when they access your self-care portal or when they, in real-time, are notified about the cost for their current usage.
• Get – Make finding the product and signing up for it smooth and enjoyable, both when it comes to getting the broadband connectivity, but also OTT services. This means making sure that you in real-time can offer the customer the ability to
purchase or access a service if it is not included in their current plan. For example if a customer is exploring a service, you, in real-time, can present them with a relevant selection of offers. This is beneficial not only for them, but to you, and your OTT partners.
• Setup – With real-time, seamless activation/delivery of the purchased service is enabled so that the user can instantly start using the service they have selected. There is no room here for the time consuming manual or off-line processes, users want instant results.
• Use – Services must be easy to use with a price that is easy to understand. Why should I pay for the data traffic if I’m already paying for the movie? Solving that question requires a two-sided business model with OTT players to ensure real-time access, delivery and quality control in order to deliver the right quality of experience.
• Pay – It should be easy to pay for usage. Not only for the initial usage, but also whenit comes to paying for additional offers as limits are reached or when users want to use new services. This requires real-time control of a users’ balance to manage credit risk and allow them to instantly purchase new services, thereby creating additional revenues.
• Get Help – It enhances the experiencecustomers receive when using customer care channels if you are always able to present up to date information to users about their consumption, problems they have experienced and compensations they
have received.
• Modify – It creates the flexibility to easily modify the contract and service levels by adding or removing new services as their needs and demands change, all in real-time. Skeptics of real-time and online Business/ Operations Support Systems will say it is more expensive than the current offline systems, but how is it then possible to serve 76% (according to WCIS) of the global mobile users with real-time charging systems when you consider that most of these users are prepaid and consequently with that low ARPU users. Real-time is fundamentally different from the traditional offline way of doing thingsand when done correctly, with real-time and online thinking end-to-end, it is not only cost efficient to implement, but also to run in the long term. So is enabling a real-time experience for all users to earn real revenue growth a reality or a dream for operators today? The fact is that the technology exists, but that full deployment of its capabilities is still rather limited. For most operators a transformation of business processes and supporting systems is required and that is not a dream, but together with the right partner you avoid making it a nightmare.
