Billing
In the past, service providers have dictated to their customers what types of services they can have, based largely on the capabilities of the network, but what if the network could repsond to customer needs. Can a new concept, knitting together the OSS, BSS and network layers provide the answer?
“Today’s models are going to fall apart when IPTV and other multi-service offerings are offered, and there is going to be a major customer retention issue,” says Yair Sakov, VP Marketing & Business Development at FTS.
“Operators are facing the need to create new revenue sources, and the issue over the past 12 months is there has been no killer application. No new SMS2 — MMS is not there and 3G is not there in huge volume. So if there is none then they need new sources, and that means real time response to address the needs of our instant society.”
Sakov argues that going beyond mobile into multiplay and multiple services means operators will face intense competition, and for their product to be perceived as viable they need to deliver the value of that proposition beyond taking separate bills and stapling them together.
To address this multi-service, real time need, Sakov says that the industry needs to develop a new market segment, named the business control layer.
“The business control layer sits between the network and the OSS and BSS. It's a technical concept to increase revenues and improve customer experience. It's a concept for the real time capture and analysis of customer interactions.
“It means you can look at a billing event and extract value from that, by offering loyalty points, or a promotional offer for example. It's about getting a service provider to push you an offer in the context of what you're doing. And for the operator it offers real time revenue opportunities.”
Sakov is proposing a repartitioning of the billing system to create a new market segment. He wants to offer the ability to capture alerts and dynamically adapt the network's behaviour itself on a customer level.
Billing, he says, has been offline, with prepaid rating siloed in real time in the network. What if you put the business logic of the service plan into the network layer?
That means,depending on what events are happening, instructing the network layer to give a good experience to a user undergoing a more time critical application. For instance, giving a call priority over a download. This in effect means allowing service providers to enable 'Bandwidth-on-Demand' meaning that customers can adapt and re-provision their service package whenever they want in real-time
In a multi-network architecture, the business control layer needs simultaneously to operate in multiple network infrastructures, responding to events in real time and recognising that they all relate to one person, and then taking appropriate action.
“Doing this would allow operators to create a true cross network service, for example rewarding a customer if he spends an extra $10 on his mobile with a VoD on his cable service. There's value Value beyond simple bundling,” Sakov says.
Sakov also says that such an approach would give a pragmatic transition to the IMS environment, offering IMS value within today's networks.
Paul Hughes, VP Billing & Payment Strategies, Yankee Group comments, “As communication services become commoditised, the service providers that can reduce churn by giving customers an improved experience, whilst maximising ARPU are the ones that will prosper. Business Control Layer is an important new technology that can give service providers the means to achieve that, and therefore realise an important competitive advantage.”
“In the past, service providers have dictated to their customers what types of services they can have, based largely on the capabilities of the network,” Karl Whitelock, Senior Consulting Analyst for Stratecast, says.
“The Business Control Layer is what the industry needs right now; it allows service providers to recognise business events - not just billable transactions - thus allowing them to offer services that customers truly want.”
One company that has been working with the concept is Belgian ISP Telenet, which allows customers to self provision their bandwidth access, perhaps moving to narrowband for a period if they have run out of quota. Patrick Vincent, Vice President Customer Care & Delivery for Telenet says, “The implications on our business have been quite visible. Since implementing a Business Control system from FTS, calls relating to this service (Telemeter) have been reduced by 40%. In addition, 15% of customers who reach self-defined quotas have been electing to pay for additional bandwidth, thus increasing Telenet revenues.”
Perhaps the industry doesn't need new acronyms, but the BCL may just answer a few needs.
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