3G Billing - What's all the fuss? (Cont'd)

The downside of value-based pricing is that it requires complex capabilities across most of the front- and back-office systems including the POS, Website, CRM, Provisioning, Billing, Finance, and Partner Management systems. Briefly, the impacts include:

• POS and Websites must be able to reflect the current pricing for a given piece of content prior to the actual purchase. This implies a complete integration with a universal product catalog that contains the actual charges that will be used by the billing system during rating. Today, many carriers manually replicate pricing information from their billing systems in their customer facing touchpoints. This will not be feasible in the new world of proliferating and volatile value-based content and data services.
• CRM systems will have to be integrated with the same universal product catalog for the same reason, but the CRM system will also need visibility to the entire purchase, provisioning, and usage sequence of events to be able to respond to questions and issues with delivery. When customers know what they are paying for a specific product they tend to have higher expectations on the quality of the product than if they perceive it to be a 'free' service included in their bundle. Agents will have to provide accurate credits/refunds based on the specific price for the content or data service in question.
• Billing, rating, and invoicing systems will need to be able to support the variety of price points associated with each piece of content and data service. Additionally they will need to provide accurate descriptions of the content or data service purchased on the invoice. Given the possibility of thousands of different content and data products on the menu, it goes without saying that the billing system must be using the same universal product catalog previously mentioned.
• Finance and Partner Relationship Management systems will need to be able to handle the complex financial settlements processes for this new class of products and services. CSPs have for decades dealt with settlements issues relating to voice services, for example, roaming, access charges, long distance, etc. But in that environment the total number of external partners with which a CSP had to 'settle' numbered in dozens. With content and data service providers multiplying like rabbits, CSPs might be expected to have relationships with hundreds. The critical point is that access to a given content or data service could become a differentiator, so it behoves CSPs not to limit their content sources because their finance and settlements systems can't accommodate the new model.

With these capabilities in place, the challenge CSPs face then becomes one of promoting the right content services to the right customers and making the price transparent and simple enough for the customers to accept.

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