Personalization Pushes Billing to Become Butterfly

Service providers have an excellent opportunity to take the lead in delivering individualized, or personalized, communications services, but the old adage applies that you have to spend money to make money. And according to a new report from Stratecast and the TM Forum, they will have to spend that money on their billing systems.

The report refers to nothing less than a metamorphosis being necessary in billing capabilities to take advantage of this opportunity. That sounds expensive. In many cases, the report suggests, it also could be disruptive as this opportunity, made more urgent by the economic downturn, comes at a time when service providers are in the midst of BSS/OSS transformation already and may need to sharpen their focus on billing. However, the report also suggests the effort would be worth it — provided they do it now.

The report, called “Winning in a Shrinking World: Significance of the Billing Metamorphosis,” concludes that service providers may be able to deliver portions of the pervasive, individualized services now in demand without a full billing transformation, but the cost of providing them will be prohibitive. Besides, those companies that wait will not be prepared for the market normalization projected for mid-2010.

The report was sponsored by billing and OSS vendor Amdocs. It included input from more than 130 service providers and the analysis of Stratecast’s senior consulting analyst, Karl Whitelock.

Like movie stars and rock stars, there are few true overnight successes and the same goes for new services. As the report points out, service providers have been pushing toward unified, access- and device-agnostic, personalized services for several years. Broadband access, network services such as location and presence, user-definable controls and security, over-the-air configuration and service delivery infrastructures such as IMS have combined to bring those ideas to fruition.

Now, it is up to billing providers to move from traditional billing systems that support mediation, partner management and basic billing, rating and charging functions to platforms that support both pre-pay and post-pay accounting, advertising models, true blended services, converged wireless, wireline and IP services, wireless and wireline networks, tiered pricing and end-user control.

“Pervasive, individualized services are driving substantial changes to billing systems and processes. These services shift control to the subscriber and place focus on the service, customer experience, real-time billing and the need for a single view of the customer data record,” said Tonia Graham, business benchmarking program manager at the TM Forum. The benchmarking program provides tools, reports and analysis that enable service providers to compare their business and operational performance to the performance of over 130 of their peers from 20 countries around the world.