Customer experience in the area of e- billing is dependent on information from the existing BSS environment, an approach that utilises the value from existing assets with minimal impact on investment level and resources.

Enhancing customer experience through e-billing and analytics adds value to existing customer care, CRM and billing solutions – as well as being agile to new and future customer requirements. It can also ensure that business customers have a consolidated and consistent experience across a complete portfolio of products, regardless of the underlying BSS or differing parameters, with ‘easy to use’ performance governance to provide complete control and transparency of their communications services throughout any organisation. Far from having a lack of data, CSPs are typically

overwhelmed with data but struggle to extract meaningful and useful information in a timely fashion. CSPs know they have the most current view of customers, their portfolios and usage, but often this data exists in different systems, which causes complexity. Removing this complexity is the key. In short, CSPs can get closer to their business customers by letting those customers get closer to themselves through the provision of online service management and unification of their BSS environment.

Changing Landscape

With a changing landscape comes new opportunities. CSPs are fully aware of the need to embrace the new business models, which, though mostly an organic consequence of the development of the internet, have been driven with speed and agility by the Webcos. As a result, the traditional ‘Network Operators’ are keen to reinvent themselves as ‘Smart Pipe Operators’ and avoid being consigned to the role of a utility.

For any organisation in any industry, achieving significant business growth in times of austerity requires new ideas and offerings, an increase in operational efficiency and absolute focus on the customer experience. This is especially true of CSPs, who carry with them a legacy of products, systems and manual processes that

To rationalize the instances of vertical legacy billing systems and thereby simplify the operation to service and charge customers, many CSPs have introduced a billing transformation programme, several of which have not been successful. History tells us that such programmes are costly, complex and have a high propensity to fail. For CSPs, billing transformation must therefore remain a long-term strategic initiative, perhaps five years away, as opposed to a short to medium term solution.

Likewise, to support the introduction and maintenance of convergent services such as Unified Communications for business customers, CSPs will need to automate processes and integrate disparate product catalogues to provide a seamless and rich experience.

For the business customer that currently subscribes to multiple services from the same provider, the experience is typically fractured, or at least, not seamless. There is a lack of convergence of billing system data, of customer products, of front-office support and of payments. This can be time-consuming and confusing for the customer and costly to operate for the service provider. And with a fractured view of the customer base, the CSP has a similarly limited view of true customer value and how to build future growth.