Billing Becomes a Merchandising Platform for Wireless Telecoms —Delivers Marketing Edge

March 8, 2011 - PRLog -- EFFORT OF THE POCONOS, PENNSYLVANIA – A closed feedback system is what telecom services have been missing for decades.   In years past, getting feedback, understanding the customer’s reaction to services, and analyzing billing data has taken way too long.

But all that’s changed. Today, billing/charging technology has progressed to the point where the usage intelligence, the charges, the user behaviors, and the analytics can all come together in near real-time. A platform that allows you to experiment and accelerate the marketing changes driven by customer behaviors at a much faster rate than you could ever achieve before.

“It’s about proactively monetizing your network investment. Instead of sitting back and hoping subscribers will come to buy your plain-vanilla commoditized services, you’re leveraging a real-time analytic and marketing engine to create highly personalized and time-sensitive offers that push people’s unique buttons” says Humera Malik, head of Global Marketing for Redknee Systems.

Here are some highlights from the interview which provides insight and perspective on marketing’s expanded role in new service design and the power of a real time billing platform:

Need of a merchandising platform:
“As voice revenues fade, the only way a telecom can remain profitable and retain subscribers is to give marketing what I call a merchandising platform. A merchandising platform takes billing to the next level. It manages prepaid and postpaid revenue transactions, but it adds a strong analytic component that gets marketing engaged in creating tailored services and all sorts of up-sell and cross-sell offers based on real-time intelligence.”

Advantage for the marketing team:
“The marketing teams know what subscribers have registered for. Then, on an on-going basis, they gather intelligence from these systems and design the services. Let’s say, for a particular multimedia service, we saw the youth market picked up on it more than the rest of the market. Well, the next set of services or the tariff plans that we design around that kind of service will be targeted towards the youth market.”

Merchandising to different subscriber profiles:
“You need to manage the treatment of subscribers throughout their full life cycle with you. So it’s all about working at various levels, defining a strategy around the various subscriber segments, understanding their payment methods, and treating them based on their value.”

Utility for multi-service operators:
“Multi-service operators are looking to provide that unified customer experience too. Over the course of time, they have replaced their legacy billing systems and migrated over to our converged billing platform to reduce the operational costs and leverage the real time capabilities to better serve their customers.”

The complete interview with Humera Malik is located on the Revenue Assurance Roundtable website at http://raround.com/bill_to_merchandise.asp

About Technology Research Institute
Founded in 1994, Technology Research Institute (TRI) is a market research and consulting firm that specializes in the areas of telecom revenue assurance and OSS/BSS software and services. For further information, visit www.technology-research.com or Tel: +1 570-620-2320.

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Revenue Assurance Roundtable is a free, peer-to-peer community where RA experts share their knowledge to stay on the cutting edge of a telecom business. It is a service of market analyst firm, Technology Research Institute (TRI). Contact the Roundtable at http://raround.com.