SHERI NG Posted online: Monday, April 25, 2005 at 0000 hours IST http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=88865 With 3G mobile services rolling out in cities across Asia, operators are poised to deliver on the long-awaited promise of richer content, faster speeds and a wider array of mobile services. Despite delays in commercial rollouts—in Asia and beyond—industry observers believe that 3G subscriber growth is gaining critical mass and that in 2005, the region’s operators will see increased adoption. Research firm IDC predicts that 3G subscribers across Asia Pacific (excluding 3G pioneers Japan and Korea, which collectively boast about 56 million 3G users) will grow from 10.5 million in 2004 to 15.5 million this year. With the prolonged hype about 3G and subscriber growth projections just beginning to materialise, it is difficult to address the question, “what’s next?” Operators need only look at the way in which 3G—and its even faster SIP and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based network architectures—will radically increase the availability and diversity of always-on content to see a paradigm shift in customer expectations looming on the horizon. Faster networks also bring increased opportunity. Operators will have the ability to know even more about their customers’ preferences, pushing personalised content and upsell opportunities directly to users’ handsets. In order to do this, one must consider the important role that billing and customer care plays in the management of such rich data and the customer’s overall experience. With a vast array of services at lightning-fast speeds, consumer behaviour and demands in a next generation mobile environment dramatically change. Subscribers not only expect operators to know their preferences for all of the services they use, but to play the role of financial manager, flawlessly managing all of their prepaid, postpaid and ‘now paid’ accounts concurrently and in real-time. For a look into how these services and consumer expectations impacts the operator, let’s use the example of Jane and Jack, two siblings addicted to playing interactive 3G games on their mobile phones. With every transaction, from the games they play to a simple voice call they make, the operator is managing their father’s “teenager financial control plan” by authenticating the user, along with the type and amount of usage against his defined thresholds. This type of scenario underscores the importance of two key billing and customer capabilities for operators: customer profile management and convergent authorisation. Customer profile management Faster networks require a more holistic view of customer accounts and services that puts the information into the customers’ hands. To achieve this, providers must tap into a wider variety of data than ever before, encompassing CRM, billing, content managers, ERP and possibly many other enterprise applications. Extracting this information from each system gives the provider a snapshot of the customer and the components of the account, but these snapshots are one-dimensional and disjointed, reflecting how each application was designed and configured, not by how customers see themselves. Providers must see past internal applications, processes and viewpoints. They must see how customers see their services structured, accounts arranged, invoices organised-in their own terms and their own hierarchies. This unified approach, ‘Customer Profile Management’ (CPM), goes far beyond traditional customer self-care by empowering customers to browse their details, organise their complex accounts and set up personalised services. CPM enables customers to manage their relationship with the carrier in their own terms; taking the wealth and diversity of enterprise information and converting it into an intuitive and manageable profile. With this level of self-management, customers can go beyond the basic functions of checking bill status and updating addresses to populating their profile with information on how and when they use services. Looking inwards, customer profiles act as the “single source of truth” of customer data for other applications and users; allowing the enterprise to view customers holistically, enabling true customer focus. The road ahead: convergent authorisation With next generation mobile services, billing requirements also dramatically change. Almost every interaction a customer has with their provider is a transaction. No longer can the operator simply rely on managing multiple balances for a single user-that is a given. This new always-on, real-time world requires the ability to handle multiple, concurrent transactions from one or a group of users simultaneously. The International Telecommunications Union predicts that by 2010, operators could see traffic on mobile networks increase 40% per year, largely driven by next generation mobile multimedia applications. CSG believes that traffic will actually be much higher, given that an operator must also authenticate and authorize each transaction. The writer is director of regional marketing, CSG Systems Apac |