Communications service providers (CSPs) across the globe are starting to offer new services, charge for new capabilities and increasingly operate as part of a wider digital ecosystem. This leaves the traditional billing system unfit for purpose so new approaches to monetisation are needed to meet the expectations of users and enable revenue generation in this new phase of telecoms. Tomer Gingold, the head of Monetization Experience at Amdocs, tells George Malim, the managing editor of VanillaPlus, that this monetisation revolution can be achieved successfully with minimised disruption and maximised benefits thanks to new systems, such as Amdocs Freestyle Billing which enables CSPs to move at their own pace to match their billing transformation needs.
George Malim: Amdocs has been at the forefront of the billing systems market for decades. How are the changes in the telecoms industry impacting CSPs’ billing requirements and capabilities, and, as the leader of this unit within Amdocs, how does change affect your strategies?
Tomer Gingold: As leaders of this domain, we constantly have to innovate. We realise the whole ecosystem is changing rapidly and we need to continuously add new capabilities. There are a lot of different aspects that are driving change and we need to address all of these to help service providers. Our main aim is to have CSPs ready for the changes they face and to help drive them and lead them into the new era.
The current market is fundamentally dominated by customer behaviour and expectations. The way we consume services has completely transformed in the digital era, becoming much more immediate and experience led. Customers are looking for Amazon and Netflix-like experiences, where it is all simple, clear, and transparent.
We’re also witnessing a growing aspiration by CSPs to grow beyond connectivity and offer a much more robust set of services. We are already witnessing this expansion into new offerings like content, cloud services and IoT. This will accelerate as 5G will eventually fulfill its promise and potential, opening the door to new services along with introducing new monetisation approaches and models. Private networks, network slicing and edge are some of the popular examples for that, and it is our role to provide our customers with the right tools to monetise all these opportunities.
It’s not only 5G where we see opportunities. We also see monetisation of application programme interfaces (APIs) coming into play. The ways in which Amazon monetises its services in multiple different ways such as capacity, consumption and quality are instructive here. The model could be per API utilised, it could be a subscription, and it could be something else. What is certain is we will see more and more variation in how telecoms services and capabilities are monetised.
GM: In this digital-first era, where customer behaviour and expectations are evolving rapidly, how does Amdocs address these changes in shaping the future of monetisation for CSPs?
TG: In many cases, bills are the major interface between CSPs and their customers and they are rarely a positive experience. Customers cannot understand their bill and that leads to frustration and confusion. This is far from the simplicity and clarity they now look for in this digital-first era.
To address these changes, we, as an industry, must change our mindset when it comes to billing. While it is still a critical component of any CSP IT stack, it is also a major part of the overall customer experience.
As part of this revolution, with our Freestyle Billing solution, customers can be empowered with freedom of choice and control. They can define how and when they want to pay for each service they consume, in a way that will make most sense to them. They get real-time transparency so they can always access their current status and see what their next bill will look like. And finally, bills are presented in a much more engaging manner– visual and personalised, making each customer feel valued and understood.
GM: So you’re basically saying that CSPs need to offer flexible monetisation. However, we see growing popularity of subscription-based services like Netflix and others. Why can’t CSPs settle for that?
TG: Subscriptions are now just one of several models available to CSPs. To maximise value and enable the complete breadth of possible services, CSPs will need a far more diverse set of monetisation capabilities than subscriptions alone.
These need to encompass pre-paid and post-paid models, real-time purchasing, subscriptions for non-telecoms services, and many other potential new models. If you look at CSPs and what they’re planning to provide, new systems will need to combine API monetisation with charging for slices, one-time purchasing and more. The right approach is to enable variety and combine all the different models – one of which is definitely subscription.
In a recent survey we ran, we found that both consumers as well as businesses value billing flexibility and freedom of choice over accuracy. A majority of businesses are even willing to pay more for a service if they can control how they’re being billed for it. This is just one example of how significant the variety of billing models really is.
GM: What technologies are being utilised by monetisation systems to help close the expectation gap?
TG: Customers have the ability to consume anything they want and their experience will be different to yours. Most billing systems didn’t have the state of mind to allow for the level of freedom and flexibility this demands or support the user experience that is expected. There is far greater personalisation and individuality, and significant change needs to happen to accommodate this.
Adoption of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) began a while ago and customers have the expectation that CSPs know who they are and understand their subscriptions and their account. This got a huge boost in the last year when Generative AI started to reveal new possibilities. Amdocs has recently launched amAIz, the leading telco-specific Generative AI framework, which links all the features of GenAI with the telecoms industry, thereby enabling revolutionary use cases across telecoms that benefit customers.
In the past, BSS has been based on classic technologies to support billing services. New systems need to be flexible and robust enough to scale up for the capabilities and volumes introduced by the new services. For massive IoT, for example, you need something much more elastic, scaling your systems to volumes never seen before . To enable this, we have invested in fully building our monetisation stack using cloud-native solutions. With our Microservices Management Platform we’re already deployed onmultiple public or private clouds demonstrating a true cloud-agnostic philosophy based on customer performance requirements and the specific regions they operate in.
These technologies really are table stakes now. We must build and provide solutions in a way that will be flexible from a scalability perspective and cost effective. One of the key drivers of BSS upgrade is the total cost of ownership (TCO). CSPs want to lead their markets, innovate and be the first to provide new services and customer-centric solutions while controlling their cost and maintaining profitability in a sustainable way.
GM: You’ve encapsulated these capabilities in your new Amdocs Freestyle Billing offering. How does this help CSPs prepare and deliver competitive advantage?
TG: When we started the journey of creating Freestyle Billing as market leaders with our classic stack of solutions. and considering the upcoming trends we’ve been talking about earlier, we realised we needed to do something else. Our basic realisation was that billing used to work as a batch-based approach that limits CSPs to fixed monthly billing cycles, which is counter-intuitive to a dynamic telecom ecosystem that needs to be agile and flexible to accommodate not just market and technology changes but also the varied expectations of a digital-first customer.
To better align with the evolving needs of our customers and the industry, we have transformed the fixed batch-based approach to a more flexible and real-time, event-based architecture. With an event-based approach all network interactions could be captured in real-time as and when they occur, eliminating the need to wait for the end of a cycle to view and manage a customer account. Having the flexibility to charge and bill in real-time enables CSPs to support innovative approaches to monetisation. Once the CSPs are freed from batch-based monthly approach – the possibilities are limitless. You can charge, bill and do whatever you want when you want to and choose whichever billing model you want for different service types – all supported by the same billing system and on the same invoice. It supports everything from subscriptions to pre and postpaid, billing for quality of service, APIs or milestone-based payments.
You can put settings in place so the user can be billed when they cross a threshold they set or to ensure a business customer isn’t bothered with a US$2 bill. This gives the ability for CSPs to react to business events and make immediate decisions on whether to issue a bill.
This is a revolutionary approach for the billing domain and we needed an engine that is truly real-time to support all monetisation models in a very flexible way. To achieve this, we developed our very robust Catalog product that is an intelligent backbone for all of the commercial activities including billing. This allows the business to define new monetisation models so they can innovate and launch new services right away into the systems.
GM: How are you optimising the Freestyle Billing processes to enhance customer satisfaction?
TG: CSPs collect and store much information that can be used to know the customer better from many different perspectives. Customers expect their CSP to know them, their services, their preferences and, therefore, send them highly targeted and personalised communications and only relevant recommendations. Amdocs uses this data in collaboration with AI embedded into the framework of Freestyle Billing to be proactive. It’s not just billing data that I’m talking about; it’s about assimilating all the different data from multiple systems to enable a 360-degree view. We’ve found several efficient ways to allow CSPs to be more predictive and to enhance customer satisfaction, which includes recommendations on the best-fitting monetisation model on the backend to personalised bill presentation on the front end.
It is one of the key differentiators for Freestyle Billing. We deliver enhanced customer experience end-to-end. From the moment the customer engages with the brand till the customer pays the bill, they experience seamless, personalized service. Amdocs Bill Experience, the behaviour-science and data-driven bill presentment solution, plays a crucial role in ensuring the seamless CX promised by Freestyle Billing.
After many years of supporting CSPs in the bill creation process, we realised many ways to transform the bill experience: simplicity, visualisation and personalisation are just a few ways in which we improve Bill Presentment.
In addition, Bill Experience as part of the freestyle solution elevates bill into an effective communication channel that not only improves the experience but also explains the value and boosts contextual up-sell and cross-sell opportunities Telecoms operators using Bill Experience have reported reduced bill-related calls to care and churn, mainly due to the intelligent application of customer data for personalising bills with easy-to-understand variable messages. AI applies context to the usage pattern to identify anomalies and highlights in the next bill, making it very simple for customers to know why they were charged more than usual. It not only improves customer satisfaction but also increases sales.
GM: How does Amdocs ensure smooth transitions for CSPs looking to adopt Freestyle Billing and what are the typical milestones in their journeys?
TG: Every CSP has their own primary business drivers – from enabling a new service or a new monetisation model to business growth and expansion into new domain like the B2B sector, consolidation or simply undertaking a transformation journey to the cloud for infrastructure optimisation. At Amdocs, we strongly believe in providing our clients the support they need for whatever their primary business objective could be.
Freestyle Billing flexibility extends to deployment models as well. We understand that a one-size-fits-all transformation journey doesn’t exist, and given that CSPs are often reluctant to “rip and replace” their existing billing systems, we offer solutions that enable gradual, tailored transformation. The Freestyle Billing journey can be started in many ways that uniquely align with their primary objective.
Let me share some of the common transformation journeys that we have supported with Freestyle Billing approach. Adding real-time capabilities to an existing billing system is one of the most popular drivers for Freestyle Billing adoption. CSPs can keep the traditional billing system and add only real-time capabilities on top of it. That might involve adding a real-time module first and then gradually following up with a phased rollout of additional billing modules to fully transform the billing system over time.
With Freestyle Billing the CSPs can easily add a new biller alongside the exiting billing system with the new Freestyle biller supporting only the new services, a specific customer segment like B2B and new monetisation model like the subscription billing while the existing system continues to support the rest of the services, monetisation models and customers as usual. In due time CSPs can slowly start migrating other customers and services on to the Freestyle Billing platform for a full system facelift.
In instances where the existing billing system has reached the end-of-life and a full transformation is required, we believe Freestyle Billing provides the best solution in the market. Not only it enhances the customer experience with all the benefits we already discussed, but also allows for full consolidation of the many billers currently in use and introduce significant savings with modernized systems running on the latest technology stack.
This is amply demonstrated by the CEO of a customer in South America who at the kick-off of a huge BSS transformation project said that he views this type of transformation as similar to moving house; it’s an opportunity to throw away all the stuff you no longer use. This is true, that BSS modernisation is a means to rationalise and reduce TCO.
Amdocs has been leading and working closely to help customers with their monetisation transformations. As we continue, we generate a lot of experience about what makes transformations successful and what the right way to transform is. It’s not just the technology or the business, it’s the organisation with change management and perception that needs to transform as well. There are a lot of different dimensions and layers to consider and we help customers transform across all of them.
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