Rapid ROI Key to Revenue Management Initiatives

The telecommunications industry is at an interesting crossroads, driven in part by the continued need for communications service providers to transform their operations in order to improve efficiency. At the same time, providers are facing a global economic slowdown that is forcing an intense review of many investment decisions. 
 
TM Forum Insights has just completed a research study based on interviews with leading telecom carrier and vendor executives, discussing expectations for revenue management and related spending over the next 12 months.   The report entitled “Revenue Management and Related Technology Trends for 2009 and Beyond” concludes that 2009 looks to be a year where investment in revenue management and related projects with rapid ROI will take precedence. We can expect to see increased focus on the key areas of assurance, real-time customer management, dynamic policy based billing, customer interaction and system performance. Since most revenue management spending is done either to capture greater amounts of revenue more quickly, or to reduce the amount of revenue lost through poorly functioning systems and processes, this technology area is one that providers cannot neglect. Three of the five key spending areas are discussed below.
 
Shifting to a Real-Time Architecture
Current market conditions will drive providers to evaluate best practices of a real-time service delivery environment and map them more closely with those in a more traditional postpaid, batch oriented environment. CSPs still need to tighten real-time linkages between OSS/BSS and CRM platforms to improve quality of service, offer better and faster customer care, and provide instant access to information about both successful and failed service consumption. Today’s high value customers have proven that they are willing to pay a premium for better service, but are also more willing to churn to get a higher quality experience.   
 
Dynamic Policy Based Billing
In the wake of falling carrier profits and the disruption of traditional voice and data pricing models by new market entrants, restoring profitability will require creative service offerings that improve the CSP’s ability to engage different customer types.  Prior to most carrier back office transformations, the back office has struggled with these new billing scenarios because it requires more than just the typical provisioning, delivery and billing of services.  As a result, CSPs must evaluate a new service management layer that supports a dynamic policy-based billing layer. This real-time business layer links network elements to all elements of the OSS layer, including provisioning, mediation, and order management. This new business control layer will allow the CSP to better track service consumption on a usage basis and drive another layer of real-time capabilities into the OSS/BSS process layer, making it easier to manage the experience at an individual customer level.
 
Resurgence of Revenue Assurance
In the face of a global economic crisis that may loom for the next 12 to 18 months, CSPs have to refocus on the importance of revenue capture.  Current market pressures are beginning to replicate what CSPs had to deal with after the Internet bubble burst in early 2001. While telecommunications has yet to see the same downturn seen in the financial industry, the current constraints are re-invigorating the importance of sophisticated revenue assurance solutions that can help them maximize revenue from new services and ensure revenue capture from existing services.
 
Service maturity in particular will begin to drive CSPs’ revenue assurance initiatives, particularly in Latin America and other emerging markets, where service growth has slowed considerably.  In the past, government run PTTs were the sole players in highly regulated markets, and lack of competition created little to no demand for revenue assurance, particularly in the rate-of-return era, when incumbents were guaranteed