In an instant

Customers today are an impatient lot. They get their cash instantly from automated teller machines, dine on fast food and shop through their televisions. They're getting used to buying-and having items sold to them-at a pace that approaches real time.

So why can't they get their telecommunications services at a similar speed? That's a question more consumers ask each day as forces such as competition and the Internet produce expectations of rapid service deployment and instant data delivery.

These forces-and the pace of modern life itself-are producing what marketing expert Regis McKenna describes in his book "Real Time" as "the age of the never-satisfied customer."

Meeting the need for speed is becoming a critical challenge for carriers. Most carriers' customers don't know what goes into provisioning a line or turning on a new service.

"Realistically, they shouldn't have to know or care," says Brad Crouch, senior practice manager at Sybase's mobile commuting and telecommunications professional services unit. "If the customer wants it, he should get it now. And if you can't provide it until this afternoon, your customer will find someone who will provide it now."

Slow to get fast Despite the almost universal agreement that higher performance is better, many carriers and vendors have been somewhat reluctant to leap into the real-time world, says Crouch.

"Development has been held back because real time is without a lot of clear market signals," he says. "Regulatory uncertainty makes it hard to invest in what some still see as a high-tech way of doing business."

No one knows what demands will be placed on operations support systems (OSSs) and what local number portability will require, Crouch says. Mergers could also make it difficult to combine different real-time systems.

"Over the last 35 years, carriers have not adopted new technologies unless they were faced with the threat of bankruptcy," says Dave Miller, senior vice president of Clear Communications, Lincolnshire, Ill.

"The traditional telecommunications world is slow to adopt real time because no one is forcing them to. But with the [1996] Telecommunications Act forcing companies to share data with their competitors and with the [Internet protocol] world already very capable of bringing customer data directly to the customer, it's going to become increasingly difficult for service providers to not embrace real time as a way of doing business."

Indeed, real time is becoming a matter of course in the IP and Internet arenas. Bottom-line processes such as electronic commerce depend on real-time transaction processing capabilities.

"Imagine you run a commercial Web site, and you've just sold someone a very large item, like a car or a large home appliance," says Steve Sommer, vice president of marketing and business development at Portal Software, a Cupertino, Calif.-based company specializing in real-time billing and management software. "If it takes time to conduct the transaction, the customer may opt to go elsewhere, and you lose the sale." Furthermore, if the company completes the sale and the customer's computer crashes, the company can't provide a confirmation of purchase, he says.

"The faster you can conduct these exchanges, the simpler things are to manage for the service provider and the more likely consumers are to use electronic media in this way," Sommer adds.

Portal's flagship product, InfraNet, is an Internet-focused billing and customer care system that manages all aspects of a service provider's relationship with its end users (Figure 1). Last fall, the company began to emphasize the real-time capabilities of InfraNet as a strategic difference from competitors' systems.

Completing Web-based sales quickly is not the only advantage of a real-time system. Internet-based video gaming may be a cash cow waiting to be milked, but billing and marketing such a service is tricky.

"Flat-rate approaches have been proved inefficient, so you want to offer a units-based method of billing for gaming," says Sommer. "For gaming, let's say that a certain price buys 1000 bullets for a game. When the player uses up his bullets, you don't want to just switch him off the service. You want to be able to recognize that he's out of units immediately and come back to him instantly with an offer for more units. You can both generate more revenue and keep the customer happy."

For more traditional telecommunications, the InfraNet platform offers similar marketing advantages.

"A lot of [Internet service providers] are looking at IP telephony as a practical future service," says Sommer. "Real time enables them to provide a tiered billing structure." Customers can pay for fewer minutes, but once they reach that threshold, ISPs can ask them immediately whether they want to enter the next level in the billing structure, he says. "It gives the service provider a lot of flexibility in dealing with the customer and helps make the customer feel like he's in control of his services."

In the IP world, such responsiveness is becoming almost commonplace, but traditional carriers have been slow to introduce it to their customers. That's because IP handles real-time services better than the public network, says Dave Donohue, a product management director at Lucent Technologies. "There's no taxing or discounting to worry about, and the software can worry about one transaction at a time," he says.

Several industry experts familiar with the issues surrounding real time believe the solution requires new ways of thinking, not new technology.

"Carriers need to be aware of what's out there," says Clear's Miller. "Internet customers have become aware that the technology is available, so they demand it. The same thing is gradually happening in the [public network]-when customers realize they can get these services, they will demand them as a matter of course."

When that happens, the carrier that can open its OSS to real-time applications will be the best-suited to keep up with customer demands, says Miller. Luckily, most recent OSS offerings have had openness as an important selling feature, so carriers should not have a problem with this component. The challenge will be with the applications that work off the OSS and deliver real-time data to end users.

"For the residential market, near-time information exchange and service activation is still acceptable," says Sybase's Crouch. "By near time, we mean five to 30 minutes. For residential customers, that's plenty of speed in most cases.

"For business customers, however, real time is much more critical," he says. "When a business customer calls and needs resources, he's usually calling because he's run up against a threshold somewhere and needs that new service now."

A fast move for business Services such as real-time updates of credit-based billing and remote provisioning are ideal for residential customers. "People are still used to waiting for these services, so an hour doesn't seem like much time," Donohue says.

On the business side of the equation, however, a quicker response is necessary. Prepaid billing plans and calling cards require immediate updates of the database to ensure customers get what they've prepaid for-and nothing extra. With its multiple billing plans, the wireless environment also requires call records and billing data to be aggregated as fast as possible.

"We've seen that some wholesalers of wireless service are able to provision access quickly, but they can't get billing up and running fast enough to meet the rate of sales of new services," says Donohue. "The wholesaler in these cases can't capture data for what amounts to a free period for the customer."

Wholesalers in the wireline world face a similar problem.

"There are much higher error rates in call records than anyone would expect," says Donohue. "[About] 3% to 5% of all calls can't be billed for, which is a very large number when you consider the amountof traffic involved." A real-time system for capturing this data could eliminate many of these errors.

Another problem is that rating plans and special offers change frequently, and updating billing records often lags far behind.

"This is a function of moving from a regulated world to a deregulated world," says Crouch. "Many of the access billing systems are so old that they have become an impediment to the wholesale-retail environment."

In the past, carriers didn't need real-time data exchange for billing, but today it can mean lost revenue if they don't have it, says Crouch.

Putting middleware solutions together to deal with these older systems has two benefits, Crouch says. Legacy billing systems can be brought up to speed and help limit the number of lost call records. As a hidden benefit, the improvement in performance will better prepare carriers' back-office operations for the day when those legacy systems are replaced.

"If you're building capabilities into your network to move and filter data in real time, you're going to be in a much better position to re-engineer," Crouch says. "If you can move data where it can be processed quickly and then move it back to where it needs to be to get to the customers or to internal planners, then you already have much of the battle won."

Increasingly, companies are seeking to host Java in their databases or employ business rules to manage data, which Crouch says are important steps toward pushing legacy systems toward real time. This accelerated environment also means analysis applications can't be "built by hand," but must be based on these rules-based business criteria for much of their design.

SLAs pick up the pace Service level agreements (SLAs) are also accelerating the pace of management and billing. "To the customer, SLAs are a real-time function," says Steve Adams, director of marketing at CrossKeys. To that end, CrossKeys developed a service management system designed to respond immediately to problems that go against the terms of these agreements (Figure 2).

"What you're talking about here is service assurance, which goes to the very nature of the new environment," says Adams. "Service assurance helps carriers build relationships with their top customers and allows information to be sliced and diced and delivered in whatever way the customer wants."

This application is basically a data warehouse that collects data from the OSS, stores it and correlates the information to use in customer reports, Adams says. The data is automatically checked against thresholds as it is recorded, and these short-term measurements can trigger alarms or customer notifications automatically.

"The purpose of an SLA is not to give money back to the customer," Adams says. "It's meant to provide him with the service he asks for by focusing on the metrics he asks for. That's not something that can be accomplished realistically by examining service every few hours or days."

Wise carriers can use this real-time capability in other parts of their operations as well, Adams says. By tying this information to marketing, carriers quickly can identify candidates for upgraded service and offer it while the customer is thinking about the problem.

Eventually this approach may be broadened to a greater number of customers to reinforce the carrier-customer relationship. It will provide the carrier with more channels for communicating with the customer, including the telephone, e-mail or Web site information, says Adams. "It will mean that, when a carrier contacts a customer, it won't always be a negative situation, like a monthly bill is to many people," he says.

For network planning, real-time snapshots of the network provide a truer picture of use than do averages captured by older measurement systems. This lets managers plan better to deal with peak usage periods.

Real-time systems also can help service providers deal with issues of fraud more efficiently.

"If you're a carrier with an interconnection agreement, you can guarantee the level of security of your part of the network, but yourtrading partner's network is something of a mystery," says Lucent's Donohue. "Real-time analysis capabilities can permit you to catch fraudulent use in the act and block the path of those calls immediately, rather than dealing with figuring out what an acceptable loss rate is gong to be at the end of the month.

"This is going to be a very important issue with inter-carrier settlements," Donohue says. "Who will pay for fraud? I detected it, but who will foot the bill for it? You want to make sure the numbers involved are as small as possible."