With new devices, technologies and services fundamentally altering the CSP business, it’s time CSPs took stock of their supporting infrastructure and adopt a modern approach to BSS, writes Gabriel Matsliach, Chief Product Officer, Comverse
Advanced network technologies and ubiquitous connectivity have opened up new revenue generation opportunities for CSPs such as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications and Enterprise Cloud Computing offerings. At the same time, more advanced and converged services are accessible to end-consumers across varying devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, increasing usage. These new connected opportunities have brought new monetisation, marketing, competitive, and customer and offer management challenges to the surface.
To secure differentiation and profitability CSPs must take stock of their supporting infrastructure. BSS – including CRM – directly enables and impacts: service offering and bundling, monetisation capabilities, and end-customer experience – including end-customer aspects of policy management. It also directly impacts the customer service representative (CSR) experience and efficiency, as well as the real-time marketing and promotions capabilities of an operator. And, of course, BSS data is an important business intelligence data source.
In the connected world, CSPs’ infrastructure must support: more services, more sophistication and higher consumer expectations; policy-enabled monetisation options and capabilities; convergence – in all its forms; real-time; the ability to do more with less.
Disparate ecosystems by their nature are not adequately equipped to address the new monetisation, customer management and crosschannel real-time marketing needs of the ultra connected world. With disparate data models and product catalogues these siloed environments produce disjointed views of customer and product data obstructing the necessary links required between this data and policy engines, CRM systems and customer care channels.
A modern approach to BSS: unification
A modular BSS system that unifies critical business functions from policy management and enforcement to CSP-specific CRM, to charging and billing – around a single data model and single service-agnostic and marketing-focused product catalogue will allow CSPs to uncover a gold mine of opportunities by exposing the full potential of their two most valuable assets: customer data and their networks. Such a system provides CSPs with the following essential business benefits required to succeed in the world of new connected possibilities:
01Advanced policy-enabled monetisation for any service or business model – through the enforcement of traffic and charging policies that are subscriber and network-aware to ensure that dimensions such as type of device and application, usage patterns, QoS and priority level and value per bit are being considered as part of offers, plans and bundles
02Automated and consistent multi-channel customer management and marketing – through the sharing of complete real-time customer information and activity, across CSP-specific CRM and customer care channels – including social media
03Real-time everywhere – even into traditional postpaid environments – through the extension of real-time rating and charging to meet regulatory bill shock requirements, limit postpaid credit risk and promote personalisation, even for postpaid subscribers
Gabreil Matsliach,
chief product officer,
Comverse
