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Why CSPs should invest in OSS/BSS

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Deepa
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Communications industry is experiencing a shift in business models, go-to-market models, service offerings and value chains. This change is being driven by the expansion from basic communications services to connectivity being embedded in devices and our daily lives. The introduction of prepaid cards in the late nineties in India led to a rapid growth in the cellular market thus allowing operators to reach out to the untapped market.

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All major operators in India have started to offer prepaid subscriptions. In addition, operators introduced schemes such as recharge coupons of smaller denominations and life time validity cards, which further contributed to an exponential growth in the subscriber base.

This caused a major shift in the OSS/BSS area because it required real-time and online processes to be implemented in the networks.

GPRS took off in India in 2000, which in turn enabled another offering - value-added services (VAS). VAS made it possible for services to be extended beyond just voice and SMS, bringing about another shift in OSS/BSS. It took another five years for the industry to start the next shift, where services were not only directed to people, but also devices and we are still seeing this shift.

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Parallel to the scenario in the 1990s, the current shift will also have a profound impact on the OSS/BSS systems of Communications Service Providers (CSPS).

This shift is leading to profound consequences in the OSS/BSS area of CSPS' operations. To date, most OSS/BSS systems have been designed with a main go-to-market model (a direct consumer model), a basic set of services (voice, SMS and data) and a simple value chain where the operator is at the top. With broadband and smart devices, users can now access a large number of over-the-top (OTT) services, and as a result the market model is changing.

Users can do a great deal over a single data connection, so the CSP is no longer only providing a basic data service, but is part of a very large number of services used by their customers to manage their lives. Additionally, many industries are adopting communications services to manage their businesses more efficiently, and as a result many devices, as well as people, are becoming connected. This presents many opportunities for the CSP.

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Previously, customer-experience management was about keeping dropped call rates and congestion below a certain average in the network, and monitoring SMS failure ratios to keep the number of undelivered messages to a minimum. Before the Smartphone, ‘data' implied monitoring the part of the network carrying the data. We are now on our way towards a Networked Society, where everything that can benefit from a connection will have one.

In this society, customer experience is about understanding, acting and responding to changes in the way customers experience and use services. In the hyper competitive environment, customer experience becomes the critical to meet their service expectations and proactively propose services that would meet new anticipated customer needs. Hence the CSPS today are more concerned about how the customer experiences their services and how they are perceived as providers, since these parameters are all part of maintaining the right level of customer satisfaction.

The second reason is the shifting of consumers to smartphones and mobile broadband, since customer experience is nothing new, but the shift to broadband connectivity and smartphone service is. Smartphones have been the drivers for a data explosion in networks, and as a result quality of service is discussed a great deal.

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According to a recent Ericsson ConsumerLab study, the top reason why customers call an operator's customer-care center is to get a clarification for why they were charged for something in a particular way. Broadband charging is hard for customers to understand, since devices do things in the background for which the customer must pay, and as a result many customers do not understand why they are charged for certain services on their accounts and bills.

The second most common reason for them calling the customer care is to change the package or plan that they are using. Customers have changed from being passive consumers of operator services in the 1990s to actively picking and choosing what they want and how they want to pay for it. Thus they want choice and control to be able to structure their package according to their personal needs, and to have control of their spending in the same way that anyone has control over their personal economy as a necessity of being able to function in modern society.

We can therefore conclude that customer experience today is about being able to determine the actual user experience by understanding the information from the networks. The next step is to get ahead of the users and rectify problems that can be solved automatically without the need for the user to even contact the CSP.

This will be helpful in saving the money of CSP and will also enhance customer satisfaction. As our world becomes more and more connected, it is a matter of transforming the existing systems to understand the network data and expose it to people and systems, both inside and outside of the CSP.

tech-news experts