Mobile operators have been employing policy control since they first set usage limits on prepay services. But they learned something in those early days that became the impetus for today’s rush to extend its capabilities to the entire customer relationship.
Operators learned that by being less dictatorial about setting limits and instead letting the customer decide when enough was enough – as long as it was within his or her credit limit – that customer would spend more. And their mindset changed.
“The bottom line is, if you involve the customer in the process, you can actually get more out of them,” said Karl Whitelock, senior consulting analyst of OSS/BSS Global Competitive Strategies at Stratecast.
Olivier Suard, marketing director at Comptel Corp. said that, indeed, prepay was a form of policy control, but that now the customer is making the decisions. “The biggest change since then is that policy control has gone from something that was a defensive measure for protecting the network to something that is a way to personalize services,” he said.
Comptel recently sponsored a report from Stratecast and Whitelock called, “Policy Control – Take Charge of Your Services to Maintain Customer Satisfaction.” It may seem at first like an odd title – mixing policy control with customer satisfaction – but it illustrates how the mindset change to give customers more control empowered and pleased them and how that is driving this quickly evolving technology forward.
“Policy is one of the hottest BSS/OSS topics out there today because it answers big questions around the customer experience. It really does put control in the hands of the customer rather than the service provider being 100 percent prescriptive,” Whitelock said. “That’s never happened before, except when Ma Bell gave you a choice other than black for your telephone.”
There are two types of policy control: policy enforcement and policy management. The policy enforcement function that shapes and throttles bandwidth is primarily a network function. However, the policy management function sets the rules for how services will be offered, delivered and charged for. Real-time charging is another change with a heritage in prepay and a much bigger life in the policy environment.
“Policy is inextricably linked to real-time rating and charging,” Whitelock said. He added that there are four parts to policy control: real-time rating and charging, policy definition, the policy enforcement role in the network and data collection (aka mediation).
It is the volumes of customer usage data and the advancements in data collection capabilities, including deep-packet inspection and deep-packet capture, along with real-time charging that are driving some of the more advanced elements of policy that enable differentiated services and targeted advertising.
