‘Falling ARPUs led to increased focus on CRM’
Voice&Data: Tell us something about your recently launched product CES 9.3.
Abhay Kumar: We continually invest in further expanding our scope to deliver more value to our customers and enable them to quickly respond to changing market dynamics. Our recently announced Amdocs CES 9.3 portfolio introduced new solutions to help service providers in their journey towards the New World of Customer Experience, an era where service providers are expected to offer innovative and personalized services and deliver them consistently across channels and with a seamless network service experience.
Service providers are in the unique position of being able to take the driver’s seat to excite their customers with new ideas and offers they have not even thought of.
With Amdocs CES 9.3 we enable them to take a leap forward and focus their efforts on a digital and omni-channel service strategy. This strategy ensures they can provide a true online experience that grows beyond the multi-play offering to include online commerce with consistency and continuity across the customer journey, whether in commerce, care or billing.
Additional solutions like interactive bills, big data marketing, care and network analytics, take another step in advancing our portfolio to deliver innovative and personalized services with a dynamic network service experience.
Throughout our history, Amdocs has been able to successfully build on key
intersections to impact the customer experience, identifying customer experience as a main pain point for its customers from the very start.
Voice&Data: What are some of the OSS/ BSS solutions trending in the Indian market?
Abhay Kumar: Service providers are shifting from a technology –centric business model to a customer-centric model. In order to deliver superior customer experience, operators adopt customized OSS/ BSS that enables them to offer bundled services and quickly rollout new and exciting services.
Some of the customized solutions that a customer looks for are convergent billing, CRM, ordering, self-service, service fulfillment, digital content delivery, and network capacity management solutions.
Convergent billing is gaining significance with mobile number portability, improved mobility, and increased broadband usage. As operators look forward to deploy 4G/ LTE solutions and improve their 3G services, improved pricing plans and CRM activities are becoming more important.
Furthermore, declining Average Revenue per User (ARPU) for voice and SMS coupled with the increasing demand for internet services has led to increased focus on improving client services (CRM) in this cost sensitive market.
Demand for Big Data and virtualized BSS and OSS technologies are also emerging, and will gain popularity as a way to keep hardware costs down and make the processing, extracting and ultimately the monetization of data, faster, more intuitive and more effective.
Big data enables intelligent and personalized and contextualized customer interaction, and targeted marketing. Service providers are putting a lot of effort into rolling out next generation networks that offer better bandwidths, higher speeds and more efficiency than older networks. And virtualization is not just about network functions, but IT functions as well.
Service providers are pushing the envelope in terms of BSS functions on the cloud. The main driving forces are CAPEX reduction, OPEX reduction and increased service agility. But beyond CAPEX, OPEX and agility, these changes will enable new services and new business models that will drive new revenue streams.
As the Indian operators go into LTE and launch more data services, the key areas service providers will be focused on assuring their revenues. Amdocs is offer- ing services around revenue assurance and fraud management and additionally to help service providers improve the overall customer experience through digital services.
Voice&Data: How do you see the rollout of 4G in the Indian market?
Abhay Kumar: India is a great market in terms of content but with more and more data coming in, the utilization of data will increase with 4G. Today, even if you have 2G you don’t have enough bandwidth available as a consumer so the demand will grow up and the need for operators to be a little more innovative becomes the need of the hour.
Voice&Data: Do you think OTT players are a big threat for telcos?
Abhay Kumar: Telcos are at the risk of becoming dumb pipes. Telcos provide them (OTT players) network and they take away your revenues. It’s becoming the reality these days.
So, what you see more actively happening is partnership with players like Facebook. Service providers today are fighting a battle, what they can do to compete against Google or Facebook, and the best way to deal with this is to collaborate, so that at the end of the day the subscriber gets the benefit and telcos are able to survive.
If you take the revenue streams away all these investment in terms of licenses and infrastructure will turn out to be a mere waste. So, partnership is the key.
In countries like Philippines, Indonesia, telcos seek out for OTT players to give a better customer experience.
As operators look forward to deploy 4G/ LTE solutions and improve their 3G services, improved pricing plans and CRM activities are becoming more important.