5 Ways to Add Millions to Your Bottom Line This Year

By: Becky Bracken

The business model for data is broken. Communications service providers (CSPs) are investing more and more into connectivity and ARPUs continue to sink. Operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) solutions are already regarded for their efficiency and ability to reduce operational and capital expenditures (OPEX and CAPEX).  Nevertheless, these tools are also opening up a whole new world of service differentiation and revenue.

Here are five easy ways CSPs can engage with OSS/BSS solutions to drive down costs and generate new revenue that could easily add millions to the bottom line this year.

This may be seen as common sense, but there is no shortage of efficiency-boosting communications technology solutions that can help CSPs design, deliver, and manage products, services, and their networks as well as the relationships with customers. Today, information technology (IT) departments can focus and supporting new services and affecting new areas of innovation and efficiency. And, doing more with less doesn't mean layoffs and cancelling the weekly doughnut delivery. Doing more with less can actually mean continuing to grow services and revenue with existing resources.

Tektronix, a provider of network measuring and monitoring tools, gives a high-octane boost to CSP network and operations engineering groups with real-time monitoring and troubleshooting of issues, even before the customer knows it's happening.

“Now you have manpower freed up to roll out a 4G network with the same number of people,” John Hamze, director of product marketing for Tektronix says.

Measuring and monitoring also enables CSPs to identify fraud on the network and make billing systems more accurate and efficient and adding to the bottom line by stopping revenue leakage.

Hamze adds that one Tektronix customer was taking an average of five days to resolve tickets “Our solution reduced that to two days. That's a huge gain in efficiency.” 

Improving the customer experience though real-time service assurance solutions is another way to boost revenue and efficiency. It's about more than reducing churn. Reliable networks handle more robust services.

Centina Systems, a provider of service assurance and service quality management solutions for communications service providers, is trying to redefine the way service providers use network intelligence and real-time information to improve service performance and quality.

“While our industry as a whole has adapted to a more customer-centric model, service assurance solutions have remained static for the most part, still focusing on point solutions and not on the entirety of the overall network performance; certainly not the customer experience,” said Anand Gonuguntla, president and CEO of Centina Systems. “Today’s highly competitive communications market demands an increased focus on the customer and, specifically, tools and technologies that enable this.”

Service assurance solutions like Centina's provide interactive, configurable dashboards that help reduce the time and effort required to deploy, maintain and support new services. They also help manage budgets better by supporting capacity planning and both short and long-term trending reports. Real-time inventory discovery optimizes resources and spending.