Considerations for Your Next-Gen Billing RFP

Harvey Stotland, Vice President of Telecommunications at Capgemini

Top RFP Considerations

• Improvements in Time-to-Market for New Products and Services
• Flexibility
• Revenue Assurance
• Product/Service Catalog that Supports Convergence
• Ability to Bundle and Unbundle Services
• Ease of Integration with Third-Party Systems
• Support for Prepaid/Postpaid Business Models
• Support for a Single Product Catalog

Convergence is the overriding theme of the entire industry, says Harvey Stotland, vice president of telecommunications at Capgemini. “There are actually a lot more commonalities among the sub-segments within communications than differences,” he said.

Stotland looks at billing in three layers: The top layer is the network, which includes how end-user customers are managed; the second layer revolves around IT operations, which includes the interaction with provisioning, reconciliation and other systems; and the third layer involves the customer experience, which he says should be seamless across the various touchpoints.

He points to flexibility as a key feature to look for but cautions that providers also need good control mechanisms in place in order to support customer demands and take care of the company’s balance sheet.

For the all-important revenue assurance, Stotland is a proponent of this feature being built in right from the start as well as automated. “I’ve been to so many shops where I see reports being generated — many of which are manual — and they just sit there,” he said. “It’s astonishing how manual the process is.”

Stotland also wants to see providers inquiring about convergence. “They have to have an appreciation for products and services converging, which means we need a lot of flexibility from mediation and also in how services are consumed,” he said.

He adds that bundling products is happening at a rapid rate, and providers need the ability to execute cross-product discounts. “This flexibility to bundle and unbundle is important from a customer experience point of view, especially as you see more sophisticated customers who can tell the difference between products from different providers.”

Stotland also says providers need to see how their vendors respond to the requirement to unbundle services and what rates they will charge to do that unbundling. “The billing system needs to handle that in a way that attaches all these points to IT, operations, the network and customer experience.”

OUTLOOK: Overall, Stotland remains positive for the billing market in 2009. “Billing transformation — especially in the case of [M&A] — is very important, so I think the upward tick we started seeing in the market a couple of years ago will continue,” he said. “I think providers are going to have to spend the money to transform their billing system in order to realize the financial benefits.”