article page
| 1
| 2
| 3
| 4 |
consolidating some aspects of billing starts to make sense. Billing, however, isn’t just about billing. It tends to include product catalogs and customer databases. Consolidating and migrating those things is risky, expensive, and tough.
Charging, however, is a functional area I can work with. I want to make it easy for customers to pay me. Cash, check, credit, debit, PayPal, gift cards, rewards points, wire transfers, pay-on-behalf of…I don’t care. If it means the customer can pay, I want to accept it. But I don’t want distinct infrastructure for each payment type or to front each one of my billing systems separately. I want a common point of entry for charges and payments with clear processes for getting the right numbers back to the appropriate billing and accounting systems. This is a well defined activity that ties directly to cash flow. My C-level peers can sign off on it and my business owners can’t complain too loudly if it’s not part of their personal agendas. I will spend less to collect as much or more money. That’s a business case.
|
|
CFOs, CEOs, and boards don’t want fancy architecture diagrams. |
|
Information Management, Convergys. “People have done their own thing on the Internet and linked their buddy circles together. Now it has turned on the service providers to catch up with that and provide an end to end experience across the service set. If they don’t do that we’ll see more of the over-the-top trend…it’s catch up and survive.”
If CSPs want to monetize Internet-style business models as part of service convergence, then their charging and payment infrastructure is the first piece to address. This is where cost reduction can start to enable some new revenue. Charging infrastructure can ultimately help CSPs to enable customers to monetize their social networks. Cutting customers in on the value chain is a good idea. Paying commissions for referrals is an old hat model that has limited success, and that’s not really what I’m getting at.
|
|
|
|
The Social Media Play
There’s a sexy side to this too. If I’m letting people pay our company the way they please, I’m doing what Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube do, except I’m making money. Those outlets succeed, in large part, because they let their users define how their experience with the service will work. I decide whose Tweets to follow and who can follow my Tweets, in addition to designing my page to look however I want. My YouTube channel is my own on-demand broadcast station and I can decide what I want to put on it and who gets to see it.
There’s a lesson here for CSPs. “For the first time I’ve seen service providers playing catch up with the consumer in the area of customer experience,” says Fiona Fulton, Director, Product & Solution Strategy,
|
|
There are two reasons services like Twitter aren’t making much money. First, their business model doesn’t charge anyone for any of the value they do and can provide. Second, even if it was, they don’t have a billing and payment infrastructure. (Consider all of the text traffic Twitter generates. It is mind boggling that they don’t share in the revenue.)
Consider this idea: I buy a TV show off iTunes that I love. But I can’t share it with anyone. I could tell my friends to buy it, but I can’t really give them an incentive to do so, nor do I get anything for encouraging them to buy. I want my CSP to change this. When I buy that TV show or a movie for $5, I want to be able to share it with three friends. If they want to
article page
| 1 | 2 | 3
| 4 | |
|
