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the lights on.” He says simplifying things for customers is the way to win and that making bills easier to understand would slash care and churn costs out of the business. He also says that simplifying BSS infrastructure makes it easier and cheaper for a CSP to operate. Shadow IT organizations pop up, fester, and bleed cash when CSPs get creative with technology boondoggles. Most importantly, he said CFOs want results, not promises. They don’t care for complexity. They want IT to cost less and do more.
All of this screams “simplification.” It flies in the face of the idea that I’ll pay a subscription fee, plus per-use charges, to video chat with my friends while sharing a game and shopping for my wife’s birthday gift. I can already do all of that for free online and, perhaps more importantly, my 13-year-old cousins are probably doing all of that and more online right this second.
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CIOs are mostly concerned with “keeping the lights on.” |
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Maybe I would. However, a problem would inevitably arise when I got my bill at the end of the month. It won’t reconstruct the context of what I was doing, or give me line items in language I understand.
When you look at mobile bills that include applications and downloads, they don’t make much sense. Things like navigation applications are spelled out pretty clearly, but most off-deck content is listed with a number or a code that looks like a cryptic field pulled right out of the database. This kind of failure to cater to the customer on the bill drives call center volume and contributes to churn. Those are costs that need to be driven out of the business. So, if we move away from unlimited pricing and do more of this kind of billing, it might drive top line revenue for a
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For BSS providers, I think it’s time to simplify the message. Help the CIO make his or her case to the Board and to the CFO. How will you move cost out of the business without too much risk or pain? How will you help make this commodity business ultra-profitable? How will you make your software more predictable and mature so, as is the case with most hardware, it just works when you plug it in? That’s the sizzle on your steak. The rest is just wishful thinking that smacks of delusion.
Make Billing Make Sense
Not everything will shift to unlimited price plans. Broadband is already there. Mobile is headed there. But there are still plenty of successful examples of pay-per-use or per-download services, like ringtones and iTunes, to show that customers are willing to pay a bit extra for certain services. I’m willing to bet there’s a limit, though. Pay 99 cents for a song I love? Sure. Pay a buck, then two bucks, then 50 cents, in the course of texting a friend, sharing a video, and playing a side-game based on our fantasy football league?
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while, but it’ll crush profitability and customer loyalty along the way.
BSS vendors can help here. This is a discrete problem that can be solved without transforming the enterprise or federating every database in the organization. Yep, I’m suggesting a point solution. I realize that’s become taboo in this sector where we rail against silos and rally for transformed infrastructure. Let’s face it though – CSPs’ IT infrastructure is messed up. We’ve been talking about fixing it for more than a decade and we’re still just talking. When you look at how CSPs operate, how jobs are broken out, and how the politics work, it’s just logical to go with the flow. If CSPs want to solve specific problems with simple solutions, then let’s do that. If you want to know more detail on this, or completely disagree with me – email me. I’d love to hear from you.
Value in Data
If BSS systems aren’t going to flex their rating muscle in complex charging scenarios, then
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