Converged Billing: Myth Versus Reality

More and more communication and content providers are embracing convergence in networks, service bundles, pre- and postpaid billing, and OSS and BSS systems. Convergence is an exciting area of business transformation, but it carries enormous risks. Bad technology decisions can put operators into dead ends, where system limitations can jeopardize customer relationships and revenue streams.

One of the first steps in making the right technology choices is to strip away hype and weed out misconceptions that often lead to common failures. Convergent billing is rife with such misconceptions, but it is a cornerstone of any provider’s ability to create a complete view of customers and services.

Myth 1: Convergence is about controlling costs and driving efficiencies.
Efficiency and cost reduction are important aspects of convergence, but by no means the whole story. Convergence is also about giving subscribers personalized services. They want instant delivery of services, dynamic and flexible real-time offers, personalized packages and control over their spending.

Converged billing can’t meet these needs unless customers can flip between services and payment options in real time. This ability will be a potent basis for competitive advantages. In the background, a convergent billing solution needs to provide a complete view of the customer and products, in order to enable customer-facing organizations to personalize offerings and care. Doing so certainly should also eliminate duplication, synchronization and other data issues that reduce efficiency and increase costs.

Myth 2: Billing expertise equals convergent billing expertise.
Standalone prepaid and postpaid billing systems are extremely different animals. Often proprietors of one or the other claim to play in both domains, but in reality they cannot fill both sets of needs within their own environment. They may not possess the production experience to handle all aspects of convergence.

For example, service providers often look to transform postpaid billing systems into converged systems. This usually involves a costly and risky project to add prepaid capabilities to an existing solution—but prepaid billing is a complex, real-time, high-availability function with which a postpaid expert may not have much experience.

Partnership is also a common stopgap. Prepaid vendors may partner with back-end financial management suppliers to offer end-to-end functionality. As with any IT architecture, however, adding more moving parts and more partners to the mix can create distracting problems that pose unnecessary risk.

Myth 3: Implementing a convergence solution can disrupt business for years.
Operators that are successful with convergence migrate as slowly or as quickly as they like, with minimal disruption. Some have been ready to move all existing customers to a converged solution immediately, but many prefer a phased approach.

Phases typically follow categories like “customer segment” or “service type.” Some phases introduce specific, new converged capabilities, like personalized rating or common self-service portals across all offerings, but they do so without disrupting existing billing processes.

Comverse applies a modular platform to convergence programs, because it allows for either a phased or aggressive cut-over, as appropriate to the operator’s business and objectives. Using a phased approach with a modular solution can also help the operator to distribute the capital cost of convergence over time. It can also reduce risk, because the operator takes smaller, more achievable steps that can each be validated and realigned to a changing roadmap before moving on to more complex or comprehensive steps.

Myth 4: The operator is better off making a short-term decision today and dealing with long-term problems later.
With a short-term approach, the operator may implement tactical solutions using a collection of suppliers and systems to fill an immediate need. When it’s time to grow, the operator is faced with a painful reality: its infrastructure is inherently unable to cope with growth and has, in fact, driven the operator into a technology dead end. Short-term gain is overwhelmed by long-term pain. Once again, a modular approach can provide the flexibility for addressing specific areas of need in the short term, but within the context of a long-term convergence road map.

Myth 5: Achieving low TCO must be easy, since everyone says they can provide it.
For an operator to lower its total cost of ownership (TCO), it needs to become more self-sufficient by reducing its dependence on suppliers and leveraging its own resources. Reducing TCO in a convergence platform can be extremely difficult if it won’t support self-sufficiency.

The operator must be able to configure new services, offers and promotions without requiring any expensive custom integration. This approach gives the operator firm control over its own future with an inherent ability to manage the solution long-term. A low-TCO solution must be driven by a “configure, don’t code” mantra that enables operators to get new offers onto the market in one or two days, not months.

Convergence requires a new way of deploying and optimizing the billing and customer care environment—one that demands proven expertise across service types, and across both the prepaid and postpaid worlds. While most operators eventually will have to migrate to convergence to stay competitive, not all billing suppliers are equally suited to the task of helping an operator transform. Choosing the right convergence platform must be a decision rooted in reality, not myth or misperception.