SUBSCRIBE NOW
IN THIS ISSUE
PIPELINE RESOURCES

Real-time CX and the Customer-Adaptive
Future of Service Charges


By embracing a more dynamic charging method, CSPs can improve upon the experiences their customers have using services, making them feel more valued, and creating new monetization opportunities.

Rather than deliver best-efforts connectivity across all service types, 5G will enable CSPs to offer differentiated experiences across device types, applications, locations, and use cases while simultaneously being able to guarantee the quality of service or experience delivered. This means that CSPs could guarantee low latency for online gaming, for example, while offering best efforts connectivity for web browsing. From a charging perspective, it also means that CSPs can get more creative in how they price and charge for services—embracing more flexible charging models based on the type of service and its required quality of service or experience.

Transitioning to an experience-driven charging model rather than a consumption-based model will create new monetization opportunities for CSPs while also laying the groundwork for charging to become the real-time customer experience engine of operations in the future. This model will also enable CSPs to deliver the personalized experiences that customers demand.

The evolution toward customer-adaptive charging

Delivering a personalized customer experience is quickly becoming table stakes for the industry and is something that CSPs’ ICP competitors do extremely well today. For CSPs, creating truly personalized experiences is a challenging feat to accomplish in real time, let alone at scale for tens of millions of customers. In the future, however, real-time personalization can be improved by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with the 5G converged charging system to enable dynamic, customer-adaptive charging.

The premise behind customer-adaptive charging is that rather than rely on fixed pricing models for services—whether they are consumption-driven, experience-based, or otherwise—CSPs can personalize the tariffs charged for services to the individual user based on their behaviors and preferences. The AI would provide information about customer behavior and intent, for example, understanding the customer’s usage patterns. Which services does the user consume frequently? What is the ideal quality of service they expect to receive for those services? What is their account standing—are they likely to churn soon? What is their customer lifetime value? What is the CSP’s target profit margin for the service being accessed? AI can provide in-depth insight into these questions in real time and enable CSPs to make immediate decisions on the rate at which a customer is to be charged for the service being accessed. 

Consider, for example, two customers playing a mobile game online. Both customers have purchased a gaming data package, which gives them ultra-fast, low latency connectivity when they play any mobile game. The standard price for the package is $5 per GB. Using customer-adaptive charging, however, the CSP can personalize the rates that each customer is charged for the package based on what is known about each of them. Perhaps the first customer is an avid gamer who frequently plays games on their mobile device and has used the gaming data package several times over the last few months. They’ve also recently downgraded other services on their account and have been checking out competitor pricing. To keep the customer happy, engaged, and loyal, the customer-adaptive charging system determines that the customer will be charged for the gaming data package at a discounted rate of $3 per GB.

In contrast, the second customer plays games on their mobile device occasionally and has used the gaming data package only a few times. The CSP wants to encourage them to continue gaming and even hopes that by offering a better rate for the gaming data package, they can encourage the customer to increase their gaming usage. The customer-adaptive charging system determines that the second customer should be charged for the gaming data package at a discounted rate of $4.35 per GB.

By embracing a more dynamic charging method, CSPs can improve upon the experiences their customers have using services, making them feel more valued, and creating new monetization opportunities. Additionally, as these customers use other types of services, the rate at which they will be charged will be calculated similarly based on their usage history and customer profile. The value of a customer-adaptive charging system is that the CSP can modify the algorithm that underpins the AI to ensure that they are delivering the ideal experience to their customers while also improving monetization.



FEATURED SPONSOR:

Latest Updates





Subscribe to our YouTube Channel