Communication service providers (CSPs) face a constant threat of larger comptetitors poaching their customers. To grow and defend their base, CSPs know they must improve their offering to commercial customers, but those customers have a different set of needs compared to residential customers. They need a wider selection of services and more innovative, valuebased billing solutions – both for themselves as well as to offer to their own downstream customers, writes Jeth Harbinson
Working with CSPs around the world, we see a core set of services that commercial customers expect. Not every customer will order every service, but the list below is a good starting point for a basic commercial services basket.
Metro Ethernet Service Classes Carrier ethernet has significant promise beyond the backhaul business. With the ability to remotely scale bandwidth in increments from one megabit per second to one gigabit per second, Metro ethernet providers can deliver several classes of service backed by strong service-level agreements (SLAs).
PRI and Hosted PBX CSPs are also discovering they can support high demand for multiline voice services quite cost-effectively, including the commonly used 23-line Primary Rate Interface (PRI) service traditionally delivered over T1 telephone trunks. Because multiline service can be fractionalised using the digital voice capabilities of high-speed data connections, CSPs are able to offer such options on a per-line cost basis rather than the traditional one-size- (and price)-fits-all mode of PRI.
Enterprise Video The emergence of video as a linchpin of MSO operations is one of the big drivers behind demand for high bandwidth among businesses of all types. The enterprise video impact extends to marketing and training; real-time applications in surveillance, home security, distance learning, digital signage, healthcare, and video-based collaboration and conferencing; and robust file transport in advertising, motion pictures and other enterprises.
Managed Service Support for Collaboration Support for network-based collaboration across multiple locations has become another important opportunity for service providers with the flexibility to shape offerings to specific customer needs. Collaboration is a catch-all term that spans a wide range of apps and services, including messaging, webcasting, internal wikis and blogs, document management, videoconferencing and unified communications. These were once the exclusive domain of large enterprises, but now they are fundamental to doing business in the SMB sector as well.
Internet of Things (IoT) According to Forrester, 65% of enterprises report that they either have an IoT strategy already or they’re implementing one, and over 80% agree IoT will be a key strategic technology. Rapid shifts in the IoT ecosystem are creating new opportunities for service providers of every description. Most profoundly, the centre of activity is shifting from mobile carriers’ efforts to develop new markets to industry-generated activity in multiple sectors. IoT is now about saving money through automation.
Back-Office Support for 21st-Century Commercial Services With so vast a range of opportunities, any single service provider, no matter how big, would be hard-pressed to pursue all of them at once. CSPs can pursue any and all of them incrementally over time, using initial revenues to expand into ever more usage and customer categories, provided they have an OSS infrastructure in place that facilitates an opportunistic growth agenda.
Selling value
Once you’ve got the basic service offering in place, you need to define your competitive differentiators.
Discounting your own services in a race to the bottom doesn’t create value for your customer, and will only lead to dissatisfaction on both sides as the quality of your service declines along with the number on the invoice.
For commercial customers, there is an easy algorithm to follow: what can you offer that will make your commercial customer the most money?
One area that offers promise is offering innovative billing options for your customers.
You can offer new billing models at two levels
First you can charge for your own services in new ways. While it’s tempting to offer turbo-charged versions of residential bundles with various combinations of different services, commercial customers don’t want to invest time unpacking the different combos to find which is the best value.
The key instead is to bill based on value-add. We know that commercial customers crave predictability for their budgeting, so consider offering a threshold alert service to proactively let customers know they’re at risk of going over budget before it actually happens.
Commercial customers also value control, so you could offer a self-serve web portal where they can see real-time usage, with the option to model how different service plans would affect their bill based on their usage trends.
But more interesting to your customers – and therefore more likely to set you apart in the market – is offering options for how your customers can bill for the services they’re providing on top of your connectivity.
The best example here is IoT. With the increase in OTA (over the air) reflashing capabilities in SIMs, connectivity is rapidly becoming a commodity that can be switched in and out almost at will. While this presents an opportunity to win new business, the risk is that a competitor with more scale and lower costs will undercut you.
Your customers know they need connectivity to power their IoT strategy, and the chances are they’re billing downstream, but they’re probably just taking airtime or data rates and marking them up to the end customer. Yes, it’s valuable to offer an easy way to manage markup and downstream bill presentation, but the real value is changing the base of how the bill is calculated.
IoT devices are all transmitting some kind of data, so consider other ways to charge than just charging by the megabyte. With a water meter, for example, why not charge by the gallon? For an automobile monitor, charge by the number of drivers using the car. For transportation or freight, charge by the number of times a truck goes off its designated route.
Offering your customers value-based billing capability secures your place in their business infrastructure. This value-based billing requires some technical sophistication, including a robust set of APIs in your BSS/OSS platform to hook into multiple data sources, then smart business logic to manipulate that data into billable events. But once the work is done – or once you adopt a platform that already has the feature set, then your relationship with your customer is safe for years to come.
Your monthly value-add progress report
Your customers should not resent receiving your bill: in fact, they should look forward to it.
Your bill is your number one communication platform to your customers, it’s a progress report detailing the return on their ongoing investment in telecoms services. It should be read each month by the CFO, CTO and even the CEO, not just blindly processed by the accounts payable department.
You can offer valuable business intelligence that will help your customers maximise the use of their communications assets. How does their services mix compare to demographically similar companies? Are there anomalies in their usage patterns that warrant investigation? If they’d deployed a different valuebased billing approach for their own customers, what would the financial outcome have been? Trending outward, how much money could they make in the next 12 months if they made some recommended adjustments now?
Your bill is the only opportunity to get in front of your customers with a guaranteed 100% open rate. Make the most of it.
