Hedging your bet

Live for today. It's a nice thought, but in the rapidly evolving telecommunications market, it's a dangerous strategy. A traditional customer care and billing solution designed for today can quickly become an outdated enigma endangering growth and profitability.

Increasing competition, constant technological innovation and savvy and demanding consumers are placing great pressure on telecommunications providers to continually diversify services and improve customer care. Customers are asking for instant service activation and immediate answers to their questions from a single source.

They also are seeking flexible packages of products and the convenience of one bill. All this has left providers desperately searching for solutions that will help them meet these growing needs and at the same time control spiraling operational costs.

Unfortunately, many customer care and billing systems are not designed to accommodate these changes because they lack the necessary scalability, modularity and flexibility. As a result, these systems limit a provider's ability to compete for the highest value customers and also prevent true convergence.

Some providers are using a bandage approach to consolidate customer care and billing functions from several disparate systems. But how often and for how long can systems be manipulated into doing something they were not designed to do?

Futureproofing In a market demanding high-quality customer care, flexible billing options, efficient business processes and rapid time-to-market, the ultimate solution deploys a futureproofing strategy. A provider's ability to implement this strategy hinges on the scalability, modularity and flexibility of its customer care and billing system. Futureproofing enables a provider to continually grow the customer base, quickly add or modify services to meet changing customer needs, reduce operational expenses and incorporate evolving technology as it becomes available.

Futureproofing is based on economic reality and necessity. Providers cannot afford the expense and resources needed to repeatedly upgrade their customer care and billing systems to accommodate new customers, technologies, services and business practices. On the other hand, providers cannot fall behind competitors that have upgraded their services.

Futureproofing leverages an object-oriented architecture to encapsulate business applications into components and integrates those components to meet a provider's needs. This approach makes it easier for a provider to add functionality by removing a single component and inserting another, rather than reworking and replacing the entire system.

It also reduces maintenance time frames and costs. As a result, providers can offer the most cost-effective and advanced services today, while possessing the ability to expand and evolve rapidly.

Retaining customers is significantly more cost-effective than recruiting new ones. Customer retention is fueled first and foremost by satisfying customer demands by offering more options more quickly and easily than the competition.

Customer care and billing solutions have advanced in the last several years to provide capabilities such as convergence, real-time pricing, customer valuation management and customer self care.

By deploying a futureproofed solution, a provider can tap into a whole new set of tools to increase customer satisfaction and improve profitability (Figure 1).

* Advanced customer intelligence systems empower providers to make more intelligent decisions about customers.

* Providers can determine the overall value of a customer and differentiate treatment based on that value.

* Value management can be performed across multiple services, such as wireless, wireline, Internet and entertainment. Providers also can leverage important demographic information.

* Real-time billing across multiple services gives providers a complete and up-to-date view of their revenue picture, while providing on-demand billing information to customers.

* Flexible rules-based product management and pricing capabilities allow for faster time-to-market for new products and services.

* Customer self-care alternatives let end users view important account and billing information, pay bills and sign up for services. This reduces a provider's operating expenses because fewer customer service representatives are needed. It also can improve customer satisfaction with real-time, 24-hour access.

* Robust billing capabilities give customers a wide range of choice in bill frequency, delivery and media.

Scalability is the key to growth Providers should look for systems that can manage their customer base today and handle the expanded volume and service portfolio envisioned in their long-term business strategy. Nothing is more frustrating than having a highly successful sales effort or service launch, only to find out the customer care and billing system could not accommodate growth.

Two major characteristics of a futureproofed customer care and billing solution involve scalability. First, to guarantee the system can handle anticipated volume and service portfolio growth, it should be designed to scale down to meet current needs. Alternatively, scaling up a system beyond its original capacity is a gamble that can result in slowdown or complete failure.

Second, a customer care and billing platform should achieve scalability through both hardware and software adjustments rather than through hardware alone. A traditional hardware solution can be compared to enlarging a waiting room to accommodate longer waiting lines, whereas increasing capacity through software scalability is similar to adding more food servers and cashiers to make cafeteria lines move faster.

Although hardware additions such as processors, memory and disk space can meet increased needs temporarily, there comes a point where expansion by hardware hits a wall. Software can provide a scalable solution. The ability to execute on demand more iterations of business routines and in parallel (Figure 2), avoid backups by applying more processing power to specific areas or by expanding the capacity of the entire system.

Another significant advantage of software-based scalability is the ability to increase or decrease capacity rapidly. This gives providers the flexibility to deal with increased volumes during peak calling periods and holidays, for example, and to make special offers more easily, quickly and efficiently.

Modularity expands capabilities A modular approach offers the advantage of choosing a particular set of components based on existing business requirements and expanding capabilities as needs change later. Modular solutions also let a provider integrate and phase in world-class solutions from multiple vendors.

True modularity in customer care and billing platforms is achieved through the use of an object-oriented architecture that encapsulates each component. Through encapsulation, the business logic of an application is self-contained rather than being spread throughout the system.

Common object request broker architecture is becoming the de facto industry standard object communication protocol used to weave together the various components, independent of how the objects are implemented or their execution location. To illustrate the power of this concept, consider that if earlier computer technology had used an object-oriented architecture approach, the Year 2000 crisis would not exist. The singular component containing the date definition could have been replaced, rather than having to rework an entire enterprisewide system.

Two certainties hold true in the telecommunications industry:

* Customer demands will continue to evolve as technological and regulatory change expands the realm of possibilities; and

* Providers will need to change rapidly and cost-effectively to stay competitive.

Futureproofing customer care and billing solutions provides a viable means for providers to keep pace with this critical challenge.