Software Evolution: The Pressure's On

If you are 100% satisfied with your billing and customer-care software, you probably are in the minority. Although today's flexible solutions are night and day from early software, they still are a far cry from what wireless carriers ultimately want. Carriers see a light at the end of the tunnel, however, as they stop designing business processes around existing software and start demanding software designed around their businesses.

Michael Palmer, Western Wireless technical project manager for customer services, said when the company launched PCS in 1995, its billing system limited the services it could offer customers.

"Now billing has become a competitive advantage. Customers pick a service provider based on how you bill them," he said. "So instead of the billing vendors telling us what we have, we are saying we must have certain things in order to meet our customers' demands."

What are carriers demanding from their vendors? Flexibility, speed, modularity and customization. So far, the path of software evolution is on the right track, but carriers still are looking for better applications, and better vendors.

THE STAGES OF SOFTWARE Tracy Wilbourn, ALLTEL senior vice president of business processes, said billing and customer-care software has come a long way since the days of mainframe servers. Back then, information service (IS) departments could easily control access to data, but users in other departments became frustrated as they relied on the IS department to write their reports. As users became more educated, they demanded access to data for use in their jobs. Enter the first stage: client-server technology. Data sits on the PC desktop so users can freely access it.

Terry Graham, OSI market solution manager, accounting management, said client-server technology also helps carriers in billing mediation, especially now that they have to deal with more network elements.

"It is not just a wireless switch anymore," he said. "You have got paging, voice mail, SMS and more. You have to be able to interface with multiple network elements that are offering different services both from a billing mediation and a provisioning point of view."

Wilbourn noted that although a client-server situation was a step up, high costs to maintain the desktop and keep the standards current came with it. As carriers moved away from mainframes and dumb terminals to more intelligent desktops and began introducing extensive LANs and WANs to support them, they had to make enormous infrastructure investments to handle the client-server technology. Carriers have spent serious dollars on servers, PCs, training for users and additional tools to support these applications. The next stage in software evolution -- web-based technology -- is coming about today and will alleviate those costs, she said. The premise is the same, but the software resides on a server for users to access with a browser. They can obtain real-time information through the Internet from anywhere, so they are not dependent on the carrier's WAN. By using this approach, carriers can offer the same flexibility as with client-server technology, without making significant investments in every desktop.

"This way, I am not dependent on my own infrastructure," she said. "I can leverage the infrastructure that the United States and the world has built to support the Internet. I don't have to have big beefy PCs and keep investing in desktops when my users are not using all the capacity that they have."

THE NEED FOR SPEED Market segmentation and mass customization have forced software systems to become more flexible. As the wireless industry places a greater emphasis on one-to-one marketing, rating and billing on a customer-by-customer basis might become a reality, Wilbourn said. Flexible billing software will be even more crucial so carriers can put new rate plans into the system immediately. Transferring information quickly is a necessity as niche marketing becomes more prevalent.

Joanne Warner, US West vice president of systems and customer operations, said the newest software offers speed through data structures and software modules. Since data does not change much, carriers can keep it well structured and move it to the network or the client-server. Then they can change modules as rate plans fluctuate. Because US West bundles its product lines for sales and billing, it needs an architecture that changes different product lines simultaneously.

"If I am making changes in long distance, I want to be making changes in wireless at the same time doing minimal coordination because the coordination slows you down," she said. "The software needs to be flexible enough and 'architected' modularly enough to allow that."

Companies using hard-coded applications still have to make changes to code, which could take a month to implement. Tables allow carriers to modify pricing plans or features without touching code. Sherry Browne, Sprint PCS chief information officer, said Sprint PCS is able to change pricing plans instantly because of its table-driven structure. The company once put in a new rate plan in an hour when it needed to respond competitively to a promotion in one of its markets. She stressed that Sprint still has to make code changes sometimes, but right now, in real time, she can change prices and components that the company bundles into a rate plan.

Speedy data transfer also benefits marketing, customer care and even operations. OSI's Graham said a perfect example of this need for speed and flexibility is pro-active customer care. Carriers can analyze the billing data they have collected from the network elements. They can use the results to prevent churn, provide reports to customers, put information on a web page or even look for fraud trends.

Browne said that although the marketing community expects software to become more flexible to support its latest and greatest schemes and pricing plans, software needs to support local, federal and state taxing requirements as well.

"There has been an increased demand on the core part of the software because of taxes," she said. "That's been a huge issue in every segment of the industry and equally as challenging."

SEARCH FOR THE SILVER BULLET There is no such thing as a silver bullet for billing and customer-care software. Sprint's Browne said almost every carrier that buys a billing and customer-care software system has to do some tweaking on its own. Most of the newest software applications are highly customizable, she said, because they are table-driven.

US West's Warner prefers to buy packages. For some functions she tries to integrate them without change, but she almost always needs to modify the billing and customer-care software. Originally US West was a network-based company, so most of its billing systems were based around telephone numbers or pricing plans. As it has become customer focused, the carrier has built its systems so customer service representatives (CSRs) can look at a customer and all of their product lines.

"That is a real switch in the structure of the software," she said. "We really had to change the underlying database architecture to be keyed on customers rather than keyed on phone numbers."

Western Wireless' Palmer expects improvements in the future. He is not completely satisfied with his billing software and said vendors have not adequately addressed Internet functionality with billing, even though the Internet soon will drive billing. He also would like to have the flexibility to make changes to the system in-house and not have to rely on vendors for upgrades. Because wireless can change in a moment, carriers do not have time to fill out forms, send them to vendors, wait to have them analyzed and then do a cost analysis.

"You need to be able to change your rate plans and your features over a weekend to accommodate the customers and the competition. That is what I would like to see," he said.

Palmer said software insufficiencies like this stem from a communication gap between vendors and carriers. To bridge the gap, both parties need to collaborate and figure out what customers want. He compared the billing and customer-care software industry to Internet software. At first, only technology gurus understood the Internet. As competition increased, more software vendors surfaced,and the software began to change.

"That is what I think is going to happen with billing vendors," he said. "As competition increases in local markets, wireless carriers are absolutely going to demand more. They are going to leave their billing vendors if they don't start accommodating what their customers need."

Browne agreed, adding that Sprint PCS is moving out of a traditional supplier-client relationship with its vendors into a collaborative partnership. The carrier is learning to write software to its outsourcer's database, and together they are searching for ways to hook the billing engine into disparate components.

"In a traditional world an outsourcer would say, 'This is my database and my code. I will be the gatekeeper and say who comes in and who goes out.' We are trying to tear down a lot of those traditional lines and bring in other best-in-class components to hook directly into that application as if it were ours," she said.

Like Palmer, Browne has a software wish list. She has found that the billing engines offered by most software vendors are fairly robust, but the customer-care engines are not.

"Vendors sell applications as if they are total customer-care and billing solutions, and the truth is what happens on the customer-care desktop and what happens in billing can be fairly discreet things," she said. "I wish that billing vendors in general would exploit that functionality more than they are. I think they are really missing it."

For example, Sprint PCS has installed and integrated separate components onto its desktop that make the customer-care software more comprehensive. Mapping software integrates with its billing system to show CSRs where customers physically reside. This system helps Sprint sell the correct rate plan to customers. Browne said there are plenty of similar applications that she has to buy separately because they are not part of customer-care software packages.

"Vendors would say it is not billing or it is not customer care," she said. "Well, I would say it is something I need on the desktop to service customers, so in my definition it is customer care."

KEEPING UP WITH CHANGE Every carrier has its own idea of what the industry will look like in three years, but nobody knows for sure, Wilbourn said. Just as today wireless and wireline are jamming into each other, they could separate again, wireline becoming a data world and wireless becoming a voice world.

"Nimbleness from systems is the biggest thing carriers are asking for," she said. "The traditional boundaries have been erased. I can't have systems that enforce those boundaries that I am going to be tearing down."

Preparing for changes of any magnitude will require communication between you and your vendor. When it comes to billing and customer-care software, 100% satisfaction is never guaranteed, but with a partnership approach, you could come close.