Billing & Charging
Billing & Charging remain fundamental steps in the business process of taking a service and rendering a bill that will deliver the revenue agreed between the customer and provider. It is a also a volume business requiring sophisticated approaches to handling large volumes of transactions and data simply and accurately. Operators are experiencing an explosion of new services although average revenues per user are generally declining. Pricing models and practices will be examined and a review made of the different payment methods used by service providers and their strengths and weaknesses for reaching global markets. Within this highly competitive market, carriers are finding that clients are becoming more are more specific about their own personal needs. Revenue models must be increasingly personalized to ensure that the perceived customer experience is conducive to a sustained and valuable customer relationship.
Revenue Assurance Strategies and Best Practice
This module looks as ways to achieve the end-goal of optimizing profitability and improving the overall customer experience by delivering accurate and easy-to-understand bills that facilitate timely payments. Tied into the overall theme of customer experience we feature examples and case studies of best practice in revenue assurance – supporting both business revenue targets and customer satisfaction goals. It also examines how metrics and KPIs can be benchmarked to supply a view of performance in several aspects relating to quality of collected data, measured revenue leakage and the efficiency of the revenue assurance process. Revenue assurance is also seen to be spanning the eTOM model to see how the fulfilment processes are key to achieving better revenue assurance, particularly in the context of today’s changing business and technology needs.
Effective Use of Business Intelligence and CRM
Central to managing the customer experience is making better use of the data held on customers that helps build a better picture of what their profile is as a customer and so facilitates offering them a more personalized and compelling service in the future. This module features a number of service provider case studies showing the approach taken and lessons learned in looking at how to leverage 360 degree view of customer to uniquely meet diverse business requirements throughout the business. Another trend is the increasing provision of online customer self-service applications but how complementing this approach with knowledgeable resources provides the dual benefits of maximizing the customer experience and also delivering actionable feedback to the business. Other examples look at how Tier 1 service providers have embarked on an enterprise wide business transformation program to redesign its core customer facing systems.
Driving Customer Loyalty and Combating Fraud
This module tackles two quite different revenue topics. Customer churn is the bane of all service providers and a more knowledgeable customer, faced with increasing competition for their business, will have ample opportunity to take their custom elsewhere. The first part of this module examines how to build customer loyalty into your service offerings. As a key part of managing the customer experience, the principles explored here will be how creating the intentional customer experience contributes to creating a delighted customer and one more likely to remain over the long run. Another approach examined is to ensure that the voice of the customer remains heard and acted upon at all times. At the same time any service provider must pay attention to the fact that fraud will potentially drain revenue but more significantly will remove the trust that must exist throughout the value chain around the delivery of third-party content, services and financial transactions. This requires means of offering authentication to reduce fraud and authorization to set guidelines/boundaries and create a more secure and convenient environment.
Service Quality Management
For many, the term “customer experience” is about the perceived quality of the delivered service and the ability of the service provider to recognize the actual problem from the customer’s perceived problem, to remedy the situation and to handle the customer to close off the problem and deal with any repercussions. This module features a mix of case studies and SQM solutions including projects to implement an end-to-end monitoring system and process to achieve better understanding of the customer experience of the services. The key motivation for this type of work is to shift from reactive to proactive operations and thus avoid performance degradations or worse still SLA violations and penalties. A foundation for such projects is detailed work to be undertaken on technical implementation of measurements, monitoring and data analyzing in order to provide accurate and up to date information on the service performance.