By Fareed Khan

The holiday season has drawn to a close, and while many consumers may have sworn off shopping as a new year’s resolution, chances are that resolution won’t last long, and most will be back in the mall or online with wallet in hand. For mobile operators, a valuable resolution may be to look at those shopping tendencies and habits, and apply those insights to their marketing strategies in the new year.

In the “old days,” shopping meant multiple visits to multiple stores, such as the produce market for fruits and vegetables, the butcher shop for meat, and the general store for milk and bread. Today, consumers expect to be able to do all their weekly grocery shopping in a single place, in a supermarket that stocks a wide range of products. A similar trend has emerged online, with online shoppers generally preferring the convenience of a site such as Amazon or Café Press that provides multiple products from a range of suppliers through a single storefront and payment system.

Mobile operators must adopt this model to successfully remain competitive while increasing revenue per user. Just as the convenience of having a single storefront—both brick-and-mortar and online for multiple goods-- has prompted the emergence of superstores, the communications market is moving toward a similar model, in which an operator can act as a single source for multiple products and services for its subscribers—both its own and those of its partners.

But adopting that model is easier said that done, due in large part to mobile service providers’ operational limitations. As operators have created new services, built out new networks, and expanded their footprints, they have ended up with back office environments specific to each network or service that typically mix legacy, commercial, and custom products. As a result, their so-called bundled services are actually more likely to be separate services, each with its own operational systems, presented with a single front end, but with little to no flexibility.

markets with low barriers to churn. While most mobile operators recognize that fact, they are uncertain on how to address these limitations imposed by their back office systems, particularly given that pressures on capex have put many ambitious OSS transformation projects on hold. However, mobile operators can take a more incremental approach without embarking on a full-scale back office transformation by investing in a few key systems, including the following:

Most mobile operators launched their digital content services by primarily focusing on on-deck content, or “walled garden” models in which content is either created internally or provided via tightly controlled relationships with third-party content partners. However, consumer demand for a wider ecosystem of content has led many mobile operators to build more open environments via service delivery platforms that enable content developers to create and publish innovative new services out to subscribers. These environments necessitate the ability to do real-time charging and settlement both with the content partner and with the customer to ensure that there is no revenue left