Why OSS/BSS is becoming important for telcos

BANGALORE, INDIA: The phenomenal growth of the Indian telecom industry was predominantly triggered by the spectacular rise in wireless subscribers, which encouraged mobile handset manufacturers to enter the market and cater to the growing demand. Additionally, the manufacturers introduced low-priced handsets and innovative features like colored display and FM radio to rope in more subscribers from different strata of the society.

Until the late 1990s, the Indian telecom industry - and particularly the mobile part of it - was wholly run on postpaid subscriptions, and services were few. In the late nineties, prepaid cards were introduced in India, which set a milestone for the wireless sector. Prepaid cards lured more subscribers into the industry while lowering the credit risk of service providers due to its upfront payment concept. This system received a positive response from first-time users who wanted to control their bills and also from students who had limited resources but greater need to be connected.

Prepaid cards helped the cellular market to grow rapidly and operators to reach out to the untapped market. To top it up, 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. All the major operators in the country had started to offer prepaid subscriptions. This caused a major shift in the OSS/BSS area because it required real-time and online processes to be implemented in the networks.

Few years later saw the launch of GPRS 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. The industry took next five years to start the next shift, where services were not only directed to people, but also devices and we are still witnessing this shift. Parallel to the scenario in the 1990s, the current shift will also have a profound impact on the OSS/BSS systems of telecom operators.

The communications industry is undergoing a shift in business models, go-to-market models, service offerings and value chains. This shift is driven by the expansion from basic communications services to connectivity being embedded in devices and our daily lives. In the OSS/BSS area of operators'' operations, this shift is having some serious consequences. 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 operator 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 numerous opportunities for the operators.

In the past, 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. And before the Smartphone, ‘data' meant keeping an eye on 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. Amidst the hyper competitive environment, customer experience becomes the utmost important to meet their service expectations and proactively propose services that would meet new anticipated customer needs.

As a result, the operators today are more interested in 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.

A recent Ericsson ConsumerLab study showed that the top reason why customers call an operator's customer-care center is to get an explanation for why they were charged for something in a certain 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.

The customer experience today is about being able to deduce the actual user experience by understanding the information from the networks. The next step is to get ahead of the users and correct problems that can be solved automatically without the need for the user to even contact the operator. This saves the money of operators and improves customer satisfaction. It is a matter of transforming the existing ecosystem to understand the network data and expose it to people and systems, both inside and outside of the operator, to enable them to manage situations as our world becomes better connected.

The author is head of Engagement Practices at Ericsson India