Operators must reap the benefits of convergent charging to achieve strong growth, says Analysys
* Operators must deliver a consistent customer experience to take advantage of service and payment convergence
* The market for convergent billing systems is set for strong growth: in Europe spend on solutions that support converged fixed-mobile billing will increase 36% from USD106 million in 2005 to approximately USD145 million by 2010
* Operators have to focus on tailored service benefits, and reshape structures and mindsets to support convergent business needs
* Business processes are key drivers of next generation OSS and BSS product development
* The relative advantage of today’s ‘superior’ services will be quickly eroded once one operator fully understands how to deliver an outstanding customer experience
Convergence is enabling mobile and fixed operators to tap new revenues from integrated services. However, in order to grow revenues and profit margins effectively, operators need to find the right balance between offering new converged packages and deploying the operational capability to deliver them, according to a new report, 'Billing for Mobility: strategies for convergent charging' published by Analysys, the global advisers on telecoms, IT and media.
According to Analysys, European operator capital expenditure on fixed-mobile convergent billing systems (excluding spend on integration services, hardware and in-house effort) will increase by 36% over the next five years from USD106 million in 2005 to USD145 million by 2010.
Operators must evaluate their ability to manage a consistent customer experience across multiple devices, networks, content services and payment methods within implementation constraints, such as the capability of their billing systems.
"Successful delivery of convergent charging through seamless mobility is driving operators to look at the bigger picture of what is required to support their customers. It means a radical examination by managers of 'the way things are done around here' and how different operations relate to each other across the organisation, " says Marion Howard-Healy, co-author of the report.
This means tackling business processes, network operations, billing and customer contacts in a consistent way. "Billing operations must be connected to business processes in the rest of the organisation. End to end integration of BSS and OSS requires the capability to do both root cause analysis across different functions in organisations, as well as the development of open systems interfaces for systems integration," says Marion Howard-Healy. "This means reshaping organisational structures to reflect converged service delivery and to overcome the silo mentalities that exist between billing and marketing groups, and between billing and networking groups.
"Both operators and vendors need to pursue change-management strategies to implement the new environment, and these must go hand in hand with the design and implementation of new charging and customer service technologies, " continues Howard-Healy.
In response to operators' and service providers' requirements, billing systems vendors are delivering greater levels of configurability and productisation in their solutions. IN platform vendors are also developing their own solutions. "We expect billing system vendors to win the battle to supply solutions to support convergent billing of prepaid and postpaid services," says Danny Dicks co-author of the report.
'Billing for Mobility: strategies for convergent charging' identifies areas critical to successful customer billing and management and discusses the response by billing systems and IN vendors. The report discusses changes taking place as they apply to four key areas: customers, internal processes, people and partners and demonstrates the varying responses from vendors in meeting the changing needs of their customers.
The report forecasts operator spend in Europe from 2005 to 2010 on three types of convergent billing system: fixed prepaid/postpaid billing, mobile prepaid/postpaid billing and fixed-mobile convergent billing.
The report is available to order from http://research.analysys.com priced GBP 1700 plus VAT.
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