Service Assurance-Aware Billing: Satisfaction Guaranteed

On the face of it, service assurance appears to be the prototypical business problem — easy to define, but difficult to execute. Let’s start with the easy part, a definition: Service assurance (SA) is a procedure or set of procedures intended to optimize performance and provide management guidance in communications networks, media services and end-user applications. Service assurance is an all-encompassing paradigm that revolves around the idea that maximizing customer satisfaction inevitably maximizes the long-term profitability of an enterprise.

The goal is to make sure customers receive the services they expect but the difficulty arises in that to do so, the business has to place itself in the customers’ shoes — seeing through their eyes exactly how well a service has been delivered. On the one hand, you cannot really know what the customer has received, while on the other, you also cannot really know what the customer’s expectations were when they ordered the service, at least at anything other than a superficial level.

The real art of service assurance is therefore being able to:

• Provide mechanisms to record what the customer actually receives by extending the “service network” to encompass the consumer device.
• Provide a way to understand the service order as an expression of concrete expectations and have these used as assurance criteria.

What You Pay For Is What You Get

Part of the process of receiving a service is exercising a right to receive the service — a right that has been previously purchased (in the case of “entitlements”) or will be purchased (in a standard “charging” scenario). Billing must manage that right, fully coordinating with the assurance that the service has been successfully delivered.

An important part of properly setting customer expectations is making sure a service order is being “charged” correctly. Billing must provide service assurance details on the actual price to be charged and/or an entitlement drawn down. In other words, billing must become both a client — charging in accordance to an assurance that a service has been delivered – and a provider – making charging and entitlement information available in the order assurance process. Put another way, billing must become an active participant in more than just the “cash” part of the “order-to-cash” process.

To achieve these objectives, billing must expose its capabilities as services – in other words it must fully embrace a service oriented architecture (SOA). These services can be classed by their role in 1) managing the right to receive, 2) in providing the order process with pricing and 3) doing both of the above in the context that services may be bundled or contracted.

Service assurance billing delivers the following “right to receive” integration services for both the order and purchase processes: