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purely virtual world and into e-commerce processes that are dependent on physical, manual delivery of the complete product offering. It effectively pulls consumers away from traditional Internet e-commerce and extends service fulfillment processes out of the TV domain and into mobile as well.
Mind the Gaps
There are many challenges in delivering these types of services. They involve interactivity, on-demand content, third-party information and integration, e-commerce financial transactions, and mobile components. The fulfillment process has to account for a number of different sub-processes. First is the on-demand delivery of information about the film, which might include the latest user reviews. It has to provide on-demand video and deliver the correct trailers on request. It has to manage access to the seating chart information and support the seat selection process. In each of these cases, the correct subscriber, authentication and entitlement information needs to be identified and delivered in real-time into whatever systems actually delivers on-demand video and the associated trailer to the set-top box.
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Without a centralized point where customer, product, and network information is managed, it becomes very difficult to support real-time systems. |
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customer, product, and network information is managed, it becomes very difficult to support real-time systems. Real-time systems execute policy-based processes, but they’re only as effective as the systems that support them. Their policies need to be well defined and the information they deliver, or transactions they execute, have to be authorized and completely accurate. The information they need, however, is currently spread across multiple silos that can not and are not designed to support real-time performance.
Find New Requirements
A centralized customer profile, process design and management, and end-to-end fulfillment are critical centerpieces for enabling real-time services. Telcos and MSOs both tend to lack these capabilities or don’t have them centralized. Processes are generally designed
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The fulfillment process also has to provision a mobile subscription in the lifestyle package, and tell an MMS server to send out a bar code as a movie ticket. In addition, it needs to support and assure the financial transactions, which includes advice of purchase and recovery from transaction failures, credit card denials, and user errors. Once conducted, the process has to be fed into the billing and CRM streams, as well. The whole event must be billed, settled, and supported properly. As well, information about these purchases must be maintained in CRM for follow-up support and up-sales, and into analytics to help analyze customer propensities.
A fundamental and common challenge for both CSPs and MSOs comes in managing these extremely complex fulfillment processes. Without a centralized point where
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within and not across silos on separate platforms, so there’s no visibility across a process that involves multiple silos. Supporting advanced video services will require an ability to manage process end-to-end across silos. This is necessary because multiple integrated service components need to be orchestrated. Maybe more importantly – a centralized process is easier to design and launch than one that’s broken into pieces and spread across silos. The latter already delays time to market for new services and that delay has to be overcome.
Similarly, customer information is generally spread across product masters, CRM systems, billing platforms and other databases. It is not centralized via data federation into a common
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