Constant changes in the communications service providers (CSPs) domain, driven from increased competition and customer demand, mean services are now becoming more complex with a much wider array of offerings and initiatives. With this increased complexity and factors such as IoT (Internet of Things) and OTT (over the top), volume of data is growing exponentially, writes Luke Taylor, chief commercial officer of Neural Technologies

CSPs need to be able to increase customer acquisitions and maximise customer revenue while minimising the risk of financial loss. Neural Technologies is assisting CSPs with a number of proactive activities to support their crucial corporate objectives:

1. Introducing new data sources – Data is growing in volume and in variation of sources as new services are continually launched. This unceasing evolution requires systems to be able to integrate such sources quickly and effectively to ensure business continuity. Having a standardised business logic approach to introducing new structured or unstructured data is critical, allowing big data enablement as well as providing the foundation for accurate revenue assurance analysis. The platform must allow for robust, stable and continuous accuracy to be achieved, and empower end users to introduce, integrate, update and edit data immediately.

2. Data distribution and management – The exponential growth in data volumes is already being witnessed in CSPs’ businesses today and will continue to grow as more services and mobile initiatives are launched and adopted. To balance relevant and practical data analysis with the IT hardware footprint – and related costs – that go with traditional processing, the need to adopt distributed architectures incorporating Hadoop, Aerospike-type architectures is paramount. Without adopting such practices and instigating intelligent processing and analysis, the cost of ownership of such systems will become unviable. Products need to incorporate distributed architecture and NoSQL type technology to allow for practical data processing and management to be achieved whilst maintaining practical costs for data digestion.

3. Rating and charging in real-time – Increased complexity in service offerings and continual competition driving more innovative service plans and tariffs means that scalable rating and charging is required, not only to successfully bill, but to ensure revenue maximisation. The need to understand tariff profitability and undertake precise rating to ensure accurate financial controls also means accurate analysis can be achieved, giving real insight to risk. The quicker the rating analysis can be achieved, the earlier issues can be identified and resolved and the related financial impact minimised.

4. Analytics – Understanding your customer, businessand risk profile is critical to successful commerce and ultimately revenues and profitability. The need for in-depth and robust analytical tools to allow for complete data understanding that can provide accurate and insightful intelligence on your business, consumers and marketplace is critical. Performing this analysis quickly is crucial to minimising financial risk. Utilising configurable supervised and unsupervised neural modelling, statistical behavioural analysis, trends, reconciliations, link analysis, business logic, and others allows for that insight to be provided.

5. Visibility – You can have warehouses of data, but you do need to know what it can do for your business and how it can be monetised. Undertaking in-depth analysis is crucial but you need to ensure you can drive value from this analysis and this requires visualisation, data exploration and management to ensure correct decisions and treatment are undertaken and a true 360 degree view of the data is achievable.

6. Action – As CSPs offer more risky and competitive services, identifying issues in a timely manner is imperative, even minutes of delay could mean thousands in lost revenue. Automated, semi-automated and manual action interfaces need to be in place to communicate with the entire business to ensure complete transparency and collaboration. Bi-directional communication with other systems, departments and processes ensures maximum response success.

7. Empowerment – The telecoms market is diverse, competitive and fast-changing so CSPs need to have responsive, dynamic and ultimately configurable products to be able to adapt to even slight nuances in business process strategy. This is critical to ensure that systems are performing to their maximum and mitigating risk.

8. Proactivity – Quick response to change is now not enough to minimise financial risk. The need to take a proactive approach in your risk management and business assurance is critical to remain one step ahead.

Reactive analysis is crucial but should not be solely relied on. A proactive approach to risk management is required to be able to identify issues and threats before they have critical impacts on your business. Bypass fraud, OTT abuse and tariff/rating discrepancies can all be approached in a proactive manner.