IT for Telcos To Stop Customer Churn

The telecommunications industry has become one of the most competitive ones,

with a  large number of telecom service providers entering in the market. User

satisfaction and enhanced user experience is emerging as the major focus point

for  the service providers, wherein preventing customer attrition, called churns

and acquiring new customers are the biggest challenges being faced currently.

With service and quality becoming the key differentiators between competing

telecom service providers, it has become essential for them to analyse the needs

of prospective and current customers and develop unique value propositions for

them and bring out attractive solutions at competitive prices without

compromising on the quality of service.

With the coming up of Mobile Number Portability, which would allow users to

retain their mobile number while shifting to a new cellular service provider,

the competition in the telecom market gets more aggressive to retain and draw

more customers. Also a declining trend is being observed in  voice revenue, as a

result of which, the focus of telecom service providers is moving towards data

services, Value Added Services (VAS) and content, as these are emerging as key

differentiators. With the roll out of 3G and with the increased data sharing,

many solutions would be required for providing increased Quality of Service to

customers, personalizing customer services and developing different billing

models.  Some of the emerging challenges the telecom sector is facing is

customer-centric and there are some emerging IT solutions that are enabling

Telcom service providers to resolve the same.

Analytics solutions



How many times have you felt a delay in translation of your orders, or

noticed errors in your billing or experienced a network failure? Such issues

quite frequently leave the subscribers dissatsified, adding to the fear of

telecom service providers of loosing customers. Not only this, with the number

of quality telecom service providers increasing, capturing new customers and

retaining the current ones is turning into a huge challenge for service

providers. So the understanding of customer usage patterns has become very

important for the telecom service providers to identify the customer's pain

points and possible areas of enhancements. This is being achieved by service

providers by deployment of analytic solutions for analyzing the huge quantities

of raw data, majority of which originates from Call Detail Records (CDRs),

created for customer billing.

Industry surveys indicate that Telcos' may be losing an estimated 3% -11% of

their revenue due to operation leakages from network failure to create records,

corrupt Call Detail Record data, delays in processing, fraud, missing files,

rating inaccuracy, collection problems, billing errors, prepay faults,

interconnect problems, software updates, provisioning errors and Debt/write-off.

An emerging solution, to resolve the same is Advanced Revenue Predictive

Analytics, that predicts and  identifies  operation leakages. It gives insight

into emerging and hidden leaks by correlating current transaction information

with historic data and gives opportunity to the revenue analysts to focus on

leaks which are at higher risk for revenue loss by using predictive techniques

to analyze historic irregularity in switch, service; tariff, feature, customer

and system upgrade activities. Once these areas are identified, the solution

also helps in tweaking the processes for business benefit. Such analytic has an

important role in areas ranging from controlling customer churn to maximizing

revenue per user.

Auto-provisioning systems



Provisioning process in telecom sector is what provides timely and accurate

customer services  It provides  information to customers about their purchase

order status and ensures delivery of service on time and customer satisfaction.

But with the increasing competition and the  need to satisfy the demand of

customers for higher quality of service, serving the customers as quickly as

possible is nothig lesser than a challenge for telecom service providers.

A solution to this is auto-provisioning system. S.V. Ramana, Chief

Information and Services Officer, Tulip Telecom elaborating on this says, “With

the increasing size of businesses, auto provisioning system would become

critical. This system takes the orders from the CRM and translates it into a

deployment into the infrastructure which is followed by handing it over to the

Network Management System and the Device Management System. Such end to end

automation is an emerging solution for telecom sector. With the size of

businesses growing, manual or semi- automatic solutions will have to be replaced

by automatic end to end auto provisioning systems.”

Next generation solutions



There is an evolution in the telecommunication core and access networks,

with more and more networks moving towards ALL-IP New Generation Networks. This

single network would be transferring all information and services: voice, data

or different kinds of media, like video. With this, the service providers would

be forced to find ways to bring down costs and satisfy customer demands for

high-quality services.

To achieve this, support systems that include processes like network

inventory maintenance, fault management, provisioning services, taking orders,

bills processing, payment collections, etc have to be developed to effectively

address the next generation infrastructure and customer needs. Addressing the

same it has been seen that there is a big standard based adoption in terms of

Next Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS), which are a set of

specifications for building the next generation of telecom service provider

support systems and Service Oriented Architecture, as defined by TeleManagement

Forum (TM Forum), which enables deployment of new Value Added Services in a much

easier and faster manner. NGOSS solution will enable service providers to

provide best customer services, deploy new products & services and run their

network and business operations in an efficient manner.

Considering the huge data bandwidth that will be soon available, and the

increased Quality of Service expectations of the end consumers, next generation

billing and settlement systems solutions are emerging, as they are going to be

driving factors for service providers for different revenue models.

Lowering Capex and Opex costs



Reducing the Capex for new deployment, and Opex, is one of the priorities.

In this sphere an emerging solution is infrastructure sharing amongst different

service providers (like tower sharing etc), driven by IT solutions, for

effective sharing of infrastructure, cost, and adequately reducing the

infrastructure expenses for the service provider.

Many of the service providers are also looking at platforms built on open

source tools, like Network Management Solutions /Operations Systems and

Software, service management and delivery, which could cut down subsequent cost

for the service provider in terms of licensing and building customized solution.

The benefits of both the aforementioned solutions can be directly passed on to

the customers by enabling bringing down of the costs at their end.