NEW YORK-A host of players behind the scenes is pulling the complex strings required to amplify and simplify the end-user experience with billing and customer relationship management for the increasing variety of wireless services.
With six or seven operators in each major market, price no longer is a major differentiater, said Steven Rodin, co-founder and president of Davinci Technologies Inc., Toronto. Consequently, wireless data and Internet access, coupled with improved customer relationship management, are becoming important competitive advantages.
“Churn is an issue. Voice has become commoditized, but voice revenues still are very high. If their competitors are offering data, carriers need to (offer it also in order to) protect their voice revenues,” said Mark Fowlie, vice president of product marketing for Amdocs’ Solect division, Toronto.
The danger is that wireless data and Internet access can quickly go down the same road as voice communications, said Steven Bamberger, vice president of marketing for Cygent Inc., San Francisco.
“When people say, theoretically, data makes billing easier, that is contrary to carriers’ interests because the only way to do that is to commoditize bandwidth. This undercuts the business case for data,” he said.
“It goes back to the old statement that customers don’t buy bits; they buy solutions. As all providers move to data, we expect an explosion of value-added services to end users. That’s the exciting piece of data, not the bits themselves.”
Voice communications customers are used to a billing model based on call duration and distance, while Internet service provider customers typically pay a flat fee based on volume and value, Fowlie said.
“Many are trying an IP (Internet Protocol) billing system to handle data, then moving it to the voice bill to give the consumer a consolidated bill as a tactical approach to introduce new services. But when you get to 3G with voice on a data network, you need a unified mediation solution between the network and billing system to earmark and delegate to reflect applications, not the network used. This could happen in 2.5G,” Fowlie said.
“Billing and CRM are linked. Customers believe they have one account, even if they have IP and voice. At the same time, carriers need convergent applications and one view of the customer for decision support and cross-selling.”
Billing and customer relationship management work in tandem toward the shared goal of increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and average revenue per unit, said Read Ziegler, chief marketing officer for Atlanta-based Derivion.
“The goal is to make billing stand alone but also to integrate it into CRM … to provide integration of those layers so call center reps can look at exactly what the end user is looking at,” he said.
“It is a complex solution behind the curtain, but the key is making it simple to end users. Pulling billing and CRM together is much easier to do electronically. … Anything carriers can do to differentiate themselves is a big win, but they also need to take costs out of their business and increase margins.”
By Derivion’s estimates, about 80 percent of customer calls to wireless provider call centers are related to billing. Davinci estimates that calls pertaining to billing account for 40 percent, while the remainder are divided equally between calls related to service questions and problems and those concerning plan features and device functionality. It costs a carrier an average of $10 per call to a customer service representative, Davinci’s Rodin said.
Reducing this operating overhead will become more crucial as wireless carriers, having skimmed the cream of the customer base, now move aggressively into market segments comprised of lower margin users, he added.
Interactive voice response systems, coupled with online billing and CRM systems, are designed to free up customer representatives to address the most difficult problems. Ideally in a wireless world, these Internet-accessible databases for customer self care will be available via mobile communications devices.
This is a wonderful vision, but it has not yet been realized because of stumbling blocks erected by human nature and technology’s limitations, said Murray Judy, vice president of engineering for Sonant Corp., San Diego.
“The stats we read are that two-thirds of visitors leave Web sites because they can’t get any help. As technology changes and becomes more complicated, it necessitates even more contact. There is still a need for human-to-human interaction, whether by phone or text chat,” he said.
“Mobile users tend to be under more pressure than other users. We are waiting for some of the technology to merge so that a mobile user in the middle of a transaction who runs into a roadblock and needs help can press a button and get a Voice Over IP connection to a customer service rep, who knows the context of the person using the device. More convergence is necessary between wireless and wireline networks because the customer support organization, which could be an outsourced provider, is connected by wireline.”
Increasing technological complexity is matched by the proliferation of service plans. This dual trend requires wireless carriers to invest in customer relationship management and billing systems that are as robust as possible, said David S. Levine, director of marking and communications for Silverline Technologies Ltd., Piscataway, N.J.
“It’s like going back to the old cable TV model of basic and premium services. If I bundle so many minutes, I get voice mail or a pager with my cell phone or a family plan. Let’s not even talk about unified messaging,” he said.
As a result, wireless providers must unify their own legacy and Web-based systems. Since their bundles may include offerings for which they are resellers, they also must link with the systems of outsourced service suppliers. The carrier whose logo is on the bill is the company customers will be contacting for all their questions and requests.
“Once you allow a subscriber to go off your network, you’ve lost control. That’s a fact of life of the Internet. But the trouble ticket will come to the wireless carrier,” said Amdocs’ Fowlie.
“These partner relationship models introduce more complexity into billing and CRM, but the offset is leverage of those capabilities into new business models and revenue opportunities.”
Cygent’s Bamberger said he does not believe any single carrier will ever be able to provide in-house all the transport and content required by the variety of voice, data and multimedia services anticipated.
“The opportunities for errors are magnified as interactions increase. Five years from now, we will see standards evolve for interactions among wholesale and retail and different service providers,” Bamberger said.
He compared this predicted development with the exchanges already created to smoothen roaming among wireless networks.
“This is slightly heretical, but I don’t believe there will be true billing for convergent services from one platform in the near future because billing systems evolved to be specialized,” Bamberger added.
“What I believe will happen is essentially a customer facing aggregation. One point of care and one point of ordering will give the customer the perception of one-stop-shop for multiple services, networks and carriers.”
