Today?s customer is more sophisticated and demanding than ever before. With the convenience of online services and shopping, we have come to expect services to be tailored to our individual needs and preferences. And we expect personalisation based on our previous experiences.
At the same time, the scope for operators to manage their customers? experience continues to broaden, ranging from helping them discover new services to proactively satisfying their needs. It is the ability to provide a better quality and more personalized mobile broadband service experience that is directly connected to increased profitability. But what is needed to seize this opportunity?
Integration for Personalization
In the recent White Paper ?Policy and Charging ? The Path to Service Personalization? we look at how integration of charging and policy control opens up possibilities for the operator to put the customer further in control of their personalized experience by creating clearly segmented offerings. These are designed to increase revenue and loyalty by providing cross-service bundling, bonuses and promotions.
Combining charging and policy control in an integrated BSS environment empowers the operator, and specifically their marketing department, with the creative freedom needed to generate a step-change improvement in customer experience and satisfaction ? based on greater personalization, choice and spending control.
From the operator perspective: Increasing profitability requires a combination of delivering positive customer experience and value differentiation, as well as managing network cost. New business opportunities include partnering with over-the-top (OTT) players and delivering partners services with premium quality.
From the Customer Experience Perspective: Giving the customer the control to adjust their own offer to buy additional speed, volume or services is not only appreciated by the customer but also helps maximizing their willingness to pay for the products and services that resonate with them individually.
The Need for Flexibility and Control
That said, all too often, the operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) are not capable of supporting a flexible business model. Rather their rigidity can impose a number of structural constraints. These make it difficult for an operator to adapt to new market trends or quickly introduce new offers to the market. Worse still, they may make it difficult to manage or understand the popularity and profitability of a new service or campaign.
Current OSS/BSS implementations often treat charging and policy control as separate silos for historical and organizational reasons. In today?s networks, these systems must collaborate in real time in order to satisfy new business needs. This means not only flexibility, but also end-to-end control. Ericsson is unique in its ability to guarantee this end-to-end control, from the radio network, core, policy, charging, service interaction and customer interaction.
Planning for Rapid Adaption
Operators need to focus on empowering their marketing departments with the creative freedom to put the customer in control, improve the customer experience and create differentiated value, while accelerating time to market and optimizing network usage.
To put this strategy into action requires three transformations.
-Integrating Charging and Policy Systems: Redesigning of the charging and policy control systems is required to create a truly integrated BSS environment from network, through policy and charging, to any customer touch point including billing and self-care applications.
-Put the Customer in Control: Processes to empower the customer, such as personalization, self-care, spending limits and notifications, need to be established to help customers have the confidence to try new services.
-Enable Complementary OTT Services: Embracing new partnership opportunities and revenue-sharing models with complementary OTT players is required to turn this strategy into a reality. Promotions, upsell packages, impulse buys and service-based add-ons are just some ways these services can be offered.
There is great opportunity in personalized services, either provided directly by operators or by enabling services from partners. Customers are always interested to try new services as long as they are relevant to them and they can be confident about the costs. Providing differentiation through integrated policy and charging is the key enabler of these new revenues.
(Contributed by Manoj Dawane, Vice President and Head, Engagement Practices, Ericsson India)
