Light Reading Webinar

July 26^th, 2007
Real-time Billing and CRM Developments Behind Next-Gen Services

We are following up on the session with an informative Q&A to address some of the areas you have highlighted during the webinar.

1. As per this poll, almost 60% of the operators are implementing or planning to implement real-time billing and CRM. Can you speak to this trend?

Redknee notes that this is inline with the trend we have seen in the market. There is increasing momentum in the market to provide real-time OSS/BSS systems including billing and CRM functionality in order to support the advent of next generation value added services; reduce operational and capital expenditures by eliminating unnecessary billing silos; and to provide for a consistent and cohesive rating strategy across pre-paid/post-paid accounts as well as access technologies (e.g. wireless, fixed broadband, cable etc.).

“A Converged Rating & Billing Solution has allowed us to offer an easy to understand, customer-friendly, future proof billing package for our prepaid, post-paid, and hybrid customers, across Voice, Messaging and Data services.”
- Earl Manning, Director of Information Technology for Digicel

2. What is convergence and what is the impact of real-time?

From the prospective of real-time rating and CRM solutions, convergence is associated with the provision of a unified rating model, as supported by a single platform, for prepaid/postpaid/hybrid account structures and across all access technologies (e.g. WiMAX, WiFi, CDMA, GSM, Cable etc.).

Real-time OSS/BSS systems ensure that subscriber services are provisioned and activated in real-time. The real-time aspect also ensures that the network operator’s customer service representative (CSR) has visibility into the subscriber transactions in real-time ensuring the subscriber queries can be responded to in real-time providing high subscriber satisfaction. Perhaps even more importantly, the provision of a real-time OSS/BSS is important for enabling a positive subscriber experience in that a given subscriber has real-time access to their account status as well the ability to control (e.g. activate/deactivate) services as they require. Finally, Real-time OSS/BSS systems will enable new and innovative pricing models such as the delivery of subsidized content based on the subscriber context and preferences.

“We chose Redknee because they deliver a complete end-to-end solution that fulfills TSTT’s total billing requirements, Redknee has a reputation for being innovative and helping carriers generate new revenues, which is crucial as we roll-out new services and packages to our subscribers.”
- Trevor Deane, Executive Vice-President of Technology for TSTT

3. Why is real-time session control important to you?

The real-time session control is important for a number reasons including:

• Enables a subscriber to be associated with a number of billing options as a configurable attribute (e.g. prepaid, postpaid, hybrid, pay per use);
• Allows the delivery of the service to be optimized (or other services to be invoked) based on the subscriber’s context and preferences (a simple example involving rating – would be to allocate charges with one set of destination numbers to be associated with a post-paid enterprise account while another set of destination numbers to be associated with a personal prepaid account);
• Enables a number of advanced capabilities that will be increasingly important in the delivery of multi-media (and IMS) content including the provision of real-time Quality of Service management; and
• Improved fraud management capabilities through transaction traceability across the network operator’s organization.

4. As per this live poll, Fast time to market seems like the biggest growth challenge at the moment. What do you think are the biggest pain points regarding new service launch and how does Redknee address that?

Redknee notes that is absolutely inline with our experience in the market. Redknee’s real-time billing and CRM solutions have been architected with a modular architecture enabling Redknee to deploy its solution in a rapid fashion irrespective of the underlying network topology or infrastructure via the use of network adaptors and interfaces. Once deployed, network operators can support any number of innovative value-added services as well as traditional telecommunications services (voice, messaging, data) via an intuitive GUI based environment. Customers are deploying the Redknee converged billing solution to ensure that they have fast time to market for innovative services. The subscribers want the services to be activated and provisioned in real time, the ability to review the rate and charge of their service usage in real time in a mechanism that is comfortable to them via either Web, SMS, USSD or WAP.

5. From customer management perspective, how do you plan to make the management simpler and effective?

Redknee provides a converged customer management platform ensuring the CSR has a single point to get the subscriber information (profile, usage, trouble tickets, billing information, services, payment etc) irrespective of the access technology (WiMAX, WiFi, GSM, CDMA etc) or the type of subscriber (prepaid, postpaid, hybrid, corporate etc) via an intuitive GUI based environment. This ensures lower operational costs for example the training costs of CSR are drastically reduced by having a single centralized platform.

Also important is the ability for a given subscriber to view their account balance or alter their preferences or services via a ‘self-care’ environment. To that end, Redknee provides subscriber’s the ability to review or alter their service profile (including account information) in real-time via a number of mechanism including the Web, SMS, USSD, or WAP.

“Redknee’s solution lets us rate traffic with enhanced granularity and scalability, it fulfills O2’s needs for current and future state requirements in a very competitive and dynamic market.”
- Anders Wasterlid, CTO Products and VP Data Product Services for O2

6. What is the most effective approach to interwork with the existing prepaid or postpaid billing system?

At the outset, Redknee recognizes that network operators have generally invested significant capital in traditional prepaid/postpaid billing infrastructure. To that end, Redknee’s solutions leverage adaptors to utilize the capabilities of existing classic OSS/BSS infrastructure where possible (e.g. an adaptor or API can be used to debit or credit an account in a given prepaid Service Control Point (SCP)).

For the purpose of facilitating access to account to Value Added Service providers, Redknee’s solutions support a set of APIs (e.g. Parlay, 3GPP, OMA etc.) that can be leveraged by 3rd party application and services etc to integrate and interwork with the billing system.

7. What are the types of charging or billing model to effective cover the subscriber’s needs?

The traditional siloed approach to deploying services will not sustain the next phase of user sophistication. Subscribers are not willing to accept a reduced suite of services in the context of acquiring a degree of cost control which is normally associated with pre-paid accounts. Concurrently, postpaid users have realized that they need better and relatively timely information to manage their spending. As new services continue to proliferate and homegrown content becomes the norm, users want to have control and visibility over spending limits and service packages – and will want to explore other billing options including hybrid prepaid/postpaid accounts and pay-per-use options.

Redknee notes a real-time billing model inherently address all possible billing requirements including prepaid, postpaid, hybrid, and pay-per-use – and is a fundamental prerequisite for addressing anticipated billing models such as subsidized content delivery based on subscriber context/preferences.

Redknee platform supports prepaid, postpaid or hybrid subscribers and all the applications are rated and charged in real time irrespective of the type of subscriber. The charging decision is based on a number of parameters for example: subscriber preferences, type of transaction, date & time of the transaction, location of the subscriber etc.

“With the eeZee service, MTC-Vodafone is the first telecommunications company in the Middle East to offer prepaid customers mobile Internet service and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) roaming services, Since the launch of this roaming service we have seen subscriptions increase by 15 percent. We attribute the uptake directly to the accessibility and ease-of-use of the service.”
- Abdullah Al-Qabandi, from Prepaid Services O&M at MTC-Vodafone (Kuwait)

8. Why is differentiated charging important?

Mobile operators must attract new customers and retain existing ones with differentiated services and relevant pricing plans. To remain competitive, network providers must be able to differentiate their service offerings by delivering compelling subscriber-centric features (e.g. rating based on delivered quality of service and location) and capabilities (e.g. access to groups of subscribers who share a given characteristic) quickly and efficiently. Network operators that are able to deliver the best convenience and value will attract the best content providers and the most loyal and profitable customers. An operator’s ability to create and enhance value consists of the network operator’s ability to effectively distil and apply accumulated customer knowledge. This knowledge constitutes a key asset that can be monetized by providing suitably filtered information to third party content and service providers (e.g. to optimize offered mobile TV streams based on the client’s current device as well as established patterns of behaviour).

Redknee’s Turnkey Converged Billing solution provides a unified real-time rating and charging engine coupled with a robust customer lifecycle management system that provides value add while reducing OPEX. It enables operators to support new revenue streams with enhanced operational efficiencies, increased customer satisfaction, improved scalability and rapid rollouts of new products and services.

To find out how you can increase both your ARPU and decrease churn by up to 50%, while reducing customer-care and OPEX cost, read Redknee’s Product Bulletin on converged billing here.