Personalization is the only way forward
Personalization is the only way forward With voice revenues dwindling, it’s high time telcos look into...
From convergence of long term evolution (LTE) to the advent of multiple connected subscribers or the growing importance of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, OSS/BSS (Operations Support Systems/Business Support Systems) remains a key area for the success of operators.
Especially, when voice revenues are dwindling, telcos should look into enhancing their OSS/BSS platform and customization of services seems to be
“Personalization improves the ability to rapidly and dynamically support user needs and address new business opportunities.”
one of the best options.
Amdocs, which works with mobile operators such as Reliance Communications and Tata Communications, believes that telecom operators have to differentiate themselves to survive in the market as their RoIs are falling.
According to Nishant Batra, Head of Engagement Practices, Ericsson India: “Personalization improves the ability to rapidly and dynamically support user needs and address new business opportunities. Today’s customers are more
sophisticated and demanding than ever before. Used to the convenience of online services and shopping, many customers expect services to be tailored to their individual needs, and personalized based on their previous experiences.”
Telcos these days are also looking at providing vertical specific solutions and creating services tailor-made.
Last year, Vodafone Business Services (VBS), the enterprise arm of Vodafone India, joined hands with Mahindra Reva Electric Vehicles to provide M2M communication services to launch the Mahindra e2o. The e2o is a ‘connected car’ and is among a select few in the world to support telematics.
“Operators we are in touch with are looking for using M2M platform to essentially launch industry or vertical specific applications; for example for the insurance or logistics sector. Mahindra Reva Electric Vehicles and Vodafone Business Services (VBS) joined hands to enable Vodafone to provide M2M communication services to launch the electric vehicle, Mahindra e2o,” says Raju Wadalkar, CTO, Tech Mahindra.
Amdocs’ CES 9.1 is the latest CES portfolio release which is designed to help service providers address the continuous shift in their customers’ behavior and expectations. CES 9.1 is an integrated product suite that allows service providers to increase customer satisfaction, personalize every experience based on real-time insight, and capitalize on new opportunities such as the SMB market and new lines of business. “Today’s customers crave interactions that are SIMPLE–social, immediate, provide multiple choice, and which deliver personalized lifestyle experiences. To enable these SIMPLE experiences, service providers need to holistically manage the customer experience from the device to the network. They need to personalize every experience with real-time insight, and allow customers to take control of their experiences across any channel, network, service or device. They can do all this, and more, with Amdocs CES 9,” says Sanjay Sharma, Regional VicePresident and Head for South West Asia Region, Amdocs.
With solutions spanning heterogeneous networks, social media, multi-play and the small and medium-sized business segment, CES 9.1 tackles some of the most pressing issues facing communications service providers today.
Meanwhile, to enhance customer experience, the task at hand for a telecom operator is to ensure excellent network support to data, flexible options of plans and top ups and convenient billing.
Enhancing Customer Experience
According to Vivek Varshney, VicePresident and Head Telecom Practices, UST Global, “Data explosion has caused a profound change in the way OSS/BSS functions today. With more data coming to the fore, OSS/BSS has to become more customer-centric. For operators to be successful, they must open up their network and service capabilities to many different players in the marketplace, ranging from developers and OTT players to the digitally native consumer, resulting in a new and diverse ecosystem.”
Hence, the need of the hour is not to improve scalability and diversity but also to become more consumer centric. Being customer-centric will enable operators to open up their organizational boundaries and turn their valuable assets into a world of new opportunities. Today, customers want to be in control of the services they use, hence advance self-care capabilities will give them the tools to serve themselves. Self-steering in turn ensures network optimization, improves customer experience, and frees up valuable human resources.
Besides, the OSS/BSS industry is currently moving beyond vanilla voice and mobile VAS services to provide multiple service (voice, video, and data) to enterprise, retail, and wholesale sectors. This requires convergent platforms for IP services, which can enable the operators to provide a converged view to subscribers and generate a single bill for all services.
So, CSPs are aggressive to cash in on these advantages of the revenue opportunity; and vendors must be able to support their rapidly evolving requirements in order to survive. Support for these new billing models is also at the top of the mind. With the rapid surge in data traffic, operators have come up with multiple ways of marketing the data products and billing them subsequently.
“For voice billing, we use CDR (call details recorder) based on which billing is done and for data it’s XDR. Data billing requires a lot of different records multiple sessions whether it’s BDSN, session management is a lot more complex compared to voice billing,” he added.
MTS was the first operator to launch prepaid data services. Doing prepaid billing was quite complex, being new it had an advantage and it didn’t have a legacy system, besides with its expertise, it was able to build an agile atmosphere or type of services customers want to use. Just after it launched its pre-paid data billing services, a number of operators followed suit.
Going ahead, operators need to simplify their OSS/BSS architecture and look for OSS/BSS capabilities: innovation and business agility to act rapidly and differentiate themselves in the new marketplace, real-time capabilities with network, customer and partner interaction, flexible
and business-oriented architecture with reusable building blocks.
Given this scenario, customer expectations have also grown and range widely from single bills for multiple subscriptions to varied plans and data products for effective data usage management. The need to communicate and create awareness on issues like usage of data, quota left, throttling etc. has also increased to ensure that customers are able to explore the true potential of mobile internet as well as control bill shocks.
Tech Mahindra’s USP lies in its end-toend expertise. It provides a host of services around domain network, mobility, analytics, cloud, security, which are the key requirement for telcos these days. M2M and cloud technologies are gaining momentum and will become mainstream at a very rapid pace. OSS /BSS strategies will center around the need to build solutions to enable the CSP to offer new services around these technologies, says Wadalkar.
Challenges
Unfortunately, after paying hefty license fees operators’ balance sheets are run- ning into losses and so investment into this segment remains a key concern.
Even though operators are willing to enhance their OSS/BSS platform, investment remains the biggest impediment.
Another big challenge is most operators are evaluating/ or are in early stages of deployment of software requirement and dependency for their network keeping in mind future demand and services. “And effective monetization of current and evolving services, delivering application performance, effective policy management. This has to overall tie-up with an effective user experience (via a portal etc)”, said Girish Trivedi, Director, Monk Consultancy.
Many service providers are also deploying small cells to improve the user experience by increasing capacity and coverage. But high complexity and sheer volume of tasks mean operators are challenged to meet their time, cost and quality targets. They need process automation to cut costs and speed up time to design and deploy small cells.
Amdocs claims that its Small Cell solution can reduce network deployment time and costs by up to 35 percent and network design time by more than 50 percent.
According to Alok Kumar, Head— Customer Services, Aircel, “The current challenges are also towards providing information regarding the most updated usage consumption, online charging and exposure alerts. This is becoming increasingly important especially when a customer is on roaming. Hence, demand to fulfillment time cycles needs the entire IT, Technical and Network ecosystem to scale in terms of providing more converged solutions, usage of plans across subscriptions or multiple portfolios.”
With the SIM card now being looked at as a M2M communication channel, the need for this ecosystem to scale up to become more robust is emerging. Operators are now working towards providing timely information to all touch points to effectively manage customer queries. This information on real time basis serves the customer as well as supports robust analytics which together lead to an enhanced customer experience.