By Matt Hooper

The level of data, products and services that Communications Service Providers (CSPs) offer has increased greatly in the last 10 years, to the point where complexity is placing unnecessary burdens on customer operations, increasing costs and negatively impacting customer experience. Coupled with new business models and increased focus on communications propositions for particular market segments such as enterprise, the complexity of managing those highest revenue customer relationships has risen significantly, and in turn is negatively impacting the ability to differentiate in business customer markets.

In the last few years, growth has predominantly come from emerging markets and mobile broadband; high volume but low margin markets. As the market turns to new segments and new models to drive growth, CSPs are increasingly looking to their business customers in the enterprise market, where there remains a compelling opportunity for investment, in order to achieve profitable, long-term growth.

Focus has always been given to high ARPU business customers and this will continue, but how can CSPs differentiate their services and drive growth from this complex, business customer base while predominantly leaving the existing O/BSS asset base in place without further complex and costly transformation? These are customers that are looking for greater value from their communications services and, in many cases, fewer suppliers. Being able to present a consolidated ‘single view’ of products and services, along with the necessary online care and billing analytic capabilities to help customers manage their businesses, has never been more important.

As business customers have more choice and alternatives are easily available, adding value at the experience layer to communications solutions will become an increasingly important selling point. Moving forward, requirements and expectations from business customers will be higher, expecting more analysis on usage, profitability, SLAs, pricing and more online management of their communications services. The burden of proof will be on the CSP, which means looking creatively at greater levels of enablement across the customer experience layer. Offering these capabilities today is becoming key to meeting customer expectation and tomorrow it will be a necessity.

proven easier said than done for many. On an operational level, the supporting functions that provision the necessary services for customers are forced to operate across a number of vertical systems for billing and CRM. This often results in a focus on improving the individual systems supporting a particular product, or the highest revenue generator, rather than enhancing the overall customer experience offering utilising all vertical systems. The challenge for CSPs is to find a horizontal approach that is scalable, enabling ‘single view’ capability, converged reporting and an enhanced online experience for customers.

In many respects customer management is in its third generation from a solution support point of view, and BSS transformation has been predominantly driven by the need to rationalise complex back-end systems to save cost. However, a new online layer driven by unified e-billing and analytics can unify multiple data sources and leave the existing O/BSS asset base in place. E-enablement is seen by many as a way to provide a single view of customer and services, and so a greater focus on e-billing analytics provides a way to offer an enhanced customer experience.