OPERATIONS SOFTWARE: CUSTOMER SERVICE RAPS

How wireless operators use or abuse the downtime created in equal parts by the economy, the apparent peak in subscriber growth and subsequent indecision about the right next-gen strategy will either rejuvenate their souls (if they have them) or turn into a colossal waste of time, opportunity and momentum.

While the purveyors of network technology and mobile gadgets at the CTIA's Wireless 2003 show will try to give the impression that downtime is over by applying the wow factor to a susceptible audience, operations software companies will be off to the side, urging operators to take this time to better understand their customers and find out what services they want, what they are willing to pay for and whether they are worth going to all that trouble for. In other words, they will try to help wireless operators get their bearings by preaching the need for solutions that ensure their products and services are priced appropriately, billed properly and sold to the right customers.

“The battleground in wireless is monetization, turning services into cash,” said James Moorehead, senior director of solutions marketing at Portal Software. “If you can't bill for it, it's not a service.”

Portal — which has been using the downtime in the U.S. market to gain both customers and experience abroad — will be telling its story to North American operators that may not yet have seen the light of value-based pricing. “We do one hundred percent of Telenor Norway's non-voice services, which are only twenty percent of their revenue, but account for fifty percent of their earnings,” said John Little, Portal's CEO. “That's not happening in the U.S. yet.”

As Wi-Fi and wireless LAN services garner a lot of attention at the show, they become two more examples of technology gaining momentum before anyone has figured out how to make real money from them. Portal and other billing providers will explain how a platform that allows operators to experiment with pricing plans on the fly is necessary for implementing new moneymaking services.

Another concept likely to gain mind share — though more from the speaker circuit than the show floor — is customer profitability management, or CPM. With subscriber growth at a standstill, operators must take the opportunity to determine how much revenue an individual customer brings in and the cost of maintaining that customer over the long run, said Daniel Kenyon, vice president of communications industry strategy at PeopleSoft.

“It is a requirement that a company first understand that customer profitability management is the most important aspect of any customer relationship,” Kenyon said. “Loyalty and retention are merely stops on the road to get to the point where you are managing customers for profitability.”

PeopleSoft's CPM combines traditional customer relationship management, revenue assurance and a third component Kenyon calls business assurance. In determining a customer's actual worth, operators will be able to consider the cost of selling particular customers, the cost of free services they use, or the number of times they ask for billing adjustments.

A recent IDC report that despite the flourishing of business intelligence software in the last few years, many IT managers do not view it a as means of addressing today's informational challenges. Perhaps that's why Kenyon says CPM solutions should be sold to the CFO.