  | Issue: | Asia-Pacific I 2008 |
| Article no.: | 10 | |
| Topic: | From concept to cash | |
| Author: | Ash Khalek and Mohan Veloo | |
| Title: | Vice President, Communications, Media and Utilities and Senior Industry Director, Communications, Media and Utilities Industry Business Unit | |
| Organisation: | Oracle Asia-Pacific | |
| PDF size: | 221KB |
About author
Ash Khalek is the Vice President for Communications, Media and Utilities at Oracle Asia-Pacific. Prior to joining Oracle, Mr Khalek spent 14 years as Managing Director of a specialist Strategic Management consulting practice and provided strategic advice to over 100 boards and senior management teams for a number of ‘Blue Chip’ organizations. The Australian Government contracted his firm for its prestigious World Competitive Service programme. He is a member of Oracle’s Global Industry Board that identifies Oracle’s future roadmap. Ash Khalek is a Graduate, International Company Directors’ Diploma course from the Australian Institute of Company Directors and Fellow of the Institution of Engineers. Mr Khalek holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Manufacturing) from Australia’s Swinburne University. Mohan Veloo is the Senior Industry Director of the Communications, Media and Utilities Industry Business Unit. He is responsible for driving Oracle’s Communications, Media and Utilities strategies and initiatives in Asia-Pacific, including Japan. Prior to joining Oracle, Mr Veloo worked in various telecommunications and media companies in the US, including Cisco Systems, Time Warner, and various telecommunications and network startups in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mohan Veloo holds a degree from Indiana University in the United States with specialisation in Computer Science and Business studies.
Article abstract
New technology makes new services possible, but turning new ideas into marketable and profitable services calls for information systems that let service providers accurately gauge the real needs and interests of their subscribers. Rapid deployment of new services can depend as much upon being able to work efficiently and rapidly with content and special service providers, as it does with marketing. Internal systems need the ability to flexibly and accurately track and bill new services and administer the partner relationships.
Full Article
In today’s competitive communications market, service providers are constantly battling for customers and wallet share. The convergence in voice, mobile, data and video networks is having profound effects. Triple and quadruple play offerings with 3G, HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), FTTH (Fibre to the Home) with innovative content and devices boggle the mind with the plethora of offerings a consumer is faced with today, from not only one but from multiple service providers. It therefore becomes increasingly difficult for a service provider to predict what will, or will not be successful in tomorrow’s market. Service providers are constantly looking for the next big thing. This requires them to constantly transform their business models to enable them to rapidly introduce and realise revenue streams from new services, while simultaneously moving towards lower cost infrastructures. In response, many service providers are moving from being service and network-centric to consumer and business-centric – to improve customer satisfaction, build brand loyalty and maximize the profitability of each customer. With the telecommunications industry in Asia-Pacific facing a period of significant growth, lines between traditional network architectures and services are disappearing, spurred by developments in technology and end-user usage patterns and demand. From convergence to ever-changing go-to-market strategies, service providers need to better position themselves for the coming change. Progressive communications service providers are seeking greater value from their software technology partners as they look to deploy next-generation services, so the ideas they generate can generate revenue faster. 1. Concept creation The ability to develop a concept is limited if the service provider does not have insight into the profile of its most profitable customer segments and their buying behaviour. Understanding consumption, modelling the adoption patterns of potential new offerings, and having a complete view of customers and products is imperative to making relevant recommendations in the service development process. However, customer data is often fragmented across multiple disparate systems, limiting the ability to have the right insights. Indeed the process of developing a concept becomes difficult, if not impossible. The first step should therefore be to consolidate the disparate customer information into one available and comprehensible view. Concept creation can now be based on more educated decisions instead of hunches! 2. Service design and configuration The rapid pace of technological change and the drive towards network convergence continue to shift market dynamics in the telecommunications industry, while creating new business opportunities and challenges. To meet the needs of the future, service providers are migrating from multiple special-purpose networks to a unified IP-based core network. In this environment, service providers require sophisticated, scaleable, next-generation service activation platforms. These provide integrated multi-service activation across all technology domains to address the activation of both high-volume mass-market services and more complex designer services. Speed to market is critical to the successful exploitation of new markets for services and content – particularly for some services that have a very short lifespan. Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) can increase agility and flexibility in the creation and deployment of new services in a cost-effective manner. As service portfolios expand in size and complexity, efficient service fulfilment becomes increasingly important to maintaining customer satisfaction and keeping costs down. Service providers should look at solutions that help automate the building, pricing, bundling, testing, deploying and managing of services in the shortest possible time. 3. Campaign execution The time and effort it takes your call centre to handle a customer query can affect the profit obtained from that customer. Providing excellent customer service is essential to improving the customer experience, but it must also be efficient. Enabling ‘closed-loop’ marketing campaign mechanisms also enables operators to analyse the viability and profitability of marketing programmes Strong customer relationship management solutions and a consolidated view of customer information helps service providers to improve the customer experience by creating, selling and servicing a portfolio of innovative, targeted offers. A consolidated, complete view of each customer’s data allows service providers to understand individual preferences by analysing consumption history; this can be used to prompt relevant offers in real time. By analysing the buying habits and behaviour of individual customers, service providers can up-sell and/or cross sell with relevant, real-time recommendations and stimulate average revenue per user (ARPU) growth, Importantly, every such contact can help build brand loyalty and strengthen customer relationships. 4. Service fulfilment Order and service management solutions can orchestrate the start-to-finish fulfilment of complex service and network orders by coordinating the activities among multiple internal business and operations support systems (BSS/OSS). Ideally, the solution should be built on a flexible, next-generation architecture, providing one-stop order orchestration for all service and technology domains. Solutions that are adaptable to multiple service needs enable service providers to nimbly adopt new, emerging services and efficiently implement high-volume mass-market services on a single convergent platform. By enabling the rapid, cost-effective delivery of new services and by automating and optimizing complex order processes, such solutions empower service providers to deal strategically with ongoing changes in the service life cycle. 5. Service usage and charging Once the offers have been marketed and services deployed, service providers need to capture and realise their full revenue potential. Billing and related systems should enable the operator to charge based on a wide range of parameters defined by the service provider associated with the subscriber, product, event and service attributes. Customers also need the power to manage their balances, control their budgets, limit their transactions, choose prepaid or postpaid options on a service-by-service basis, as well as to pay for services with non-monetary items such as loyalty points or airlines miles. The ability to manage consumer balances in a highly detailed manner improves the customer experience and allows service providers to monitor customer spending, resulting in reduced credit exposure, improved risk detection and standardized credit management across the platform. 6. Billing and collections Determining what customers really want is only half the battle. The revenues generated from services must be captured, billed and collected in a timely manner. Accurate billing and effective bill presentment are critical to safeguarding revenues and promoting customer satisfaction. As settlement processes moving from a monthly to daily or even real-time activity, it is important to accurately track and assure royalties and revenue sharing in real time. Very often, service providers use separate, non-integrated, systems with each dedicated to a specific network or service line, making it virtually impossible to profitably create offers with price tags that appeal to the market. Service providers need billing and revenue management solutions that let them centralize pricing and rating of all services and products regardless of network or line of business. By segmenting products, and controlling prices and price lists by customer segment or brand, product and pricing configurations can be reused without re-creating new ones from scratch. Service providers also need an updated, accurate picture of partner accounts receivable and payable, and an easy way to issue partner statements, as well as to avoid or resolve disputes and payment delays. Billing and revenue management solutions should provide accurate, real-time capture and application of revenues – for both customer and partner accounts – as services are rendered on the network. This will give service providers an up-to-date view of not only revenues and receivables, but insights into customer profitability, service profitability and the overall health of the business as well. Real-time revenue management is a weapon in the race to become the ultimate one-stop shop for information, communications and entertainment services. In today’s fast changing communications landscape, technological advances and user habits are pulling service providers in different directions. Not only do service providers need to keep up with the changing technology, they face increasing challenges predicting and identifying the right services for customers. When they do, time to market is critical. Service providers need to partner with strategic technology partners to ensure that they can gain insight to customer profitability and the overall health of the business. Service providers can radically improve time to market for new services, build stronger brands and lower operational costs by managing and realising revenues, and by maximizing the revenue stream for each customer type, service offering, partner relationship, payment method, business model or geography. At the end of the day, service innovation is only as good as the ability to bring the service from concept to cash.
