Smart BSS Applications, the 'Linchpin' of Broadband Value

By Bob Lento, President of Information Management, Convergys

A decade ago, fledgling Web tycoons proclaimed that Internet traffic would “double every 100 days.” That boast became the butt of jokes when the dot.com market went belly-up, but nobody’s laughing now. Credit the explosive growth of broadband.

It’s no secret that demand for broadband is booming, fueled by social media, video, Skype, games, TV everywhere and over-the-top, peer-to-peer file sharing, Web mail, instant messaging and as many apps as your smartphone can handle. Even though the traffic numbers in no way approach the old dot.com-ers’ predictions, they still astound. Cisco sees global consumer Internet traffic soaring 40 percent annually through 2013 to more than 33,000 quadrillion petabytes per month.¹  A single petabyte, if you’re wondering, is a quadrillion bits of data – think “1” with 15 zeros behind it. To meet this demand, major service providers in the United States alone already commit $50 billion annually to capital investment.² They may well need – and quickly fill – every digital pipe that money can buy.

Yet one overarching issue remains unresolved for many service providers: Will they have a different kind of “bandwidth” where it’s most needed – in the back office?

Today’s networks are intelligent. But too often their owners rely on legacy back-office systems never designed to handle the complex requirements of next-generation services that must be conceived, launched, then quickly decommissioned to make way for the next breakthrough. In this fast-paced, often fickle marketplace, where today’s innovation soon becomes tomorrow’s commodity, providers need smart BSS applications that complement smart networks – to stay one pace ahead of demand, and as importantly, to ensure that every product or service delivers indispensable value to the end-user.

To understand why smart BSS applications are so critical, consider a perspective from Linchpin, the latest book by world-renowned blogger and author Seth Godin: “Consumers are not loyal to commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, the human.” To succeed, companies must leverage or even become what Godin calls linchpins – meeting the needs and interests of millions of individuals and businesses via must-have products and services. To Godin, “Linchpins are indispensable, the driving force of our future.”

In the broadband era, smart BSS applications are that linchpin. It enables carriers to create products based on real-time intelligence drawn from customer interaction and feedback, then quickly pursue those lucrative opportunities and offer billing options that drive in revenue. This new paradigm holds true not only in communications, but in a kindred field – energy – where evolution to new smart grid technologies will hinge on real-time, interactive capabilities made possible by smart BSS applications.

The value of smart BSS applications:

• Improve commercial agility — Helps service providers launch new offers quickly to react to market conditions.
• Speed competitive response times for personalized services — Lets providers compete based on personalization, sophistication and bundling of services – the “human” element described by Seth Godin.
• Maximize revenue through differentiation — Promotes a retail focus empowering the provider to embrace marketing disciplines such as customer segmentation and category management. 
• Reduce costs through better product management solutions — Drives down the cost and time of new product introduction and product change management, streamlining introduction and support for new offerings.
• Deliver the ultimate service experience. Recent consumer research by Convergys shows that what customers value most – why they select and stay with a company – is quality of service, not brand or price. By delivering convergent services quickly and accurately through any channel, without order fallout, smart BSS applications deliver an outstanding experience that boosts loyalty and usage.

As broadband growth continues its inexorable rise, the clock is ticking. As just one example, the U.S. government is poised to unleash $7.4 billion in broadband stimulus funding to expand high-speed network services to underserved markets, and, it is hoped, make broadband penetration in this country as close to universal as possible.

As many have learned, however, building new infrastructure is just Step 1. Service providers only win and keep market share when they deliver the value customers seek — and here BSS will prove instrumental. By upgrading the back office to be on par with today’s sophisticated networks, providers can deliver unsurpassed value that will make them indispensable to customers, and the driving force of this industry’s future.

¹Source: Cisco IP forecast quoted in “Wireless & Wireline Telecom Services, Data Center Report,” Merrill Lynch/Bank of America, November 2009.
²Source: “Broadband Stimulus,” TMCnet, Gary Kim, December 17, 2009.

Bob Lento is president of the Information Management line of business at Convergys, a global leader in relationship management. He is responsible for the global development and strategy of Smart Business Support Systems solutions in the telecommunications industry and Smart Customer Information Systems solutions for the deployment of smart grid technologies. Reach him at bob.lento@convergys.com .