Last decade had witnessed telecommunication, media and entertainment industry growing into a new dimension, where almost all service and delivery models became digital and IP oriented. OTT technologies are further driving digitization into a new convergent world. At the same time Operators are having a tough time to keep up with customer’s expectation for an end to end experience across products offered, ordered, consumed and monetized. Operators are also realizing the importance of partnership with OTT providers and content aggregators who at the moment are riding on top of operator network by offering innovative value added services to the operator’s own customer. However this is adversely affecting operator revenue by creating a scenario where operator himself is getting downgraded to a position similar to a dump pipe carrying all value and still not able to make return out of that.

Today’s Telecom, broadband and other carriers are facing these challenges irrespective of tiers and geographies , and most of them are aware of the agility required in their strategy, systems and approach to manage it. Aspiring to join this league of full communications service providers, the operators are realizing the need to align their infrastructure with their strategic goals i.e., to be able to offer triple play and quadruple play services to their customers. Facing the intense competition in the marketplace, and the fast evolution and advancements in network technology, service providers find themselves crippled with their existing inflexible billing systems. Industry analysts, Forums, Integrators and ISV are helping operators to address these concerns and the most important move in their plan is to have the convergent business and operations support system implemented. It will enable the operator to become more agile with their offerings, transparent in their interface towards customers , ensure real-time bit wise monetization of services, open up towards partners and above all, will provide centralized view on customers and their relationships , usage and revenue patterns .

On top of service convergence mentioned above, prepaid and postpaid convergence is now becoming inevitable. Operators and Service Providers have to decide on when and how they perform the convergence. In addition, service providers are thinking on relevant solutions in place so as to merge the CRM and Billing functions seamlessly so as to support service convergence along with prepaid and postpaid convergence. Prepaid and postpaid combined model (Hybrid) is what all service providers are all looking for owing to the advantages of the model.
Service providers understand that customer care, charging and billing is where the rubber meets the road. Service turn-up and delivery mean nothing if customer payment does not happen. Taking into consideration all these aspects, the major functions required for a Customer Care, Charging and Billing system would ideally be the following

• Uniform Product Catalogue- One of the key aspects of a convergent system is its ability to bundle diverse products together to form hybrid services and offer to customer. The major factors which get positively influenced due to this are, the operators capability to launch services quickly and thus better ROI and reduced implementation costs.
• Unified Customer View and Management of Accounts/Subscriptions
• Real Time Charging – Convergent charging will help operators to launch true convergent service portfolios like IMS video calling , where the charging system not only need to interact with next generation IMS network elements for capturing the usage information in online , but also perform session management and rating of two diverse service portfolio which is Voice and Data. Customer may have different rating characteristics or tariff as part of his/her rate pan for addressing the usage for voice and data usage even if the service delivery is of a single hybrid service. In addition to service convergence, OCS or convergent charging should also handle multiple payment models- postpaid, prepaid and hybrid across balance, credit limit and subscription limits.
• Unified customer hierarchy – Unified customer hierarchy is the ability of convergent systems to support all subscriptions across services and payment modes, maintaining all the subscription and sharing rules, under one customer entity.
• Single Bill – The most common use case of convergent billing system is the single bill capability. It brings the capability to consolidate all charges, across service and products to form a single bill. A convergent billing platform should also have the capability to generate statements for prepaid subscriptions as well within same bill.
• Convergent AAA and Captive Portal – A true convergent AAA platform should be capable of handling fixed-mobile convergence across different access topologies. Single stack which could address multiple access network 3GPP (GPRS, UMTS, 4G) and Non 3GPP (Wi-Fi, WiMAX, DSL, ADSL, FTTX, iburst). Compliance to 3GPP AAA standards to support internetworking of non 3GPP access over 3GPP service; Mobile data offload for example. Diameter/Radius based convergent charging and policy management interface is another expected function
• Convergent Policy Management – For ISP and MSO who offer fixed and wireless broadband services, a convergent policy management is need of the hour to help operators address innovative use cases like
  Service aware session based charging & policy control
  Device and location based access Restriction
  Parental Control
  Bill shock prevention –credit control, allowance , prepaid
  APN and Access network based polices
• The function could offer convergent uses cases on policy management viz.. Prepaid and postpaid, access agnostic and access specific policies. Fixed (DSL, ADSL, FTTX), Mobile, 3GPP (GPRS, UMTS, LTE) and Non 3GPP services (Wi-Fi and Wimax).
• Unified self-care portal with multiple profiles and integrated payment gateways – Convergence at Customer level is the key aspect of convergence highlighted across this article. Convergent charging, convergent billing and unified customer hierarchy as well as single bill are prominent use cases to establish that fact. A unified self-care platform for both prepaid and postpaid segments as well as all quad play services is very key in that respect – of both convergence as well as customer experience.
• Integrated work flow and notification management – A convergent business and operation support system should have enough flexibility by means of event management feature to manage different events across various business processes involved –credit limit expiry, payment, order generation, billing etc.
• Contact Center & Customer Interaction modules – Contact center provides the convergence of multiple interaction channels; It is the capability within the contact center to offer multiple channel based interactions call, Web , email and chat
• Campaign Management – Campaign management and targeted marketing could make use of the unified customer information provided as part of a convergent solution –customer profile, bill, usage patterns, payment patterns, balances, status, services and products so that it could enable real time marketing initiatives and campaigns.
• Partner Management and Revenue share – From partner management of OTT /IPTV /Content providers, operators need the system to support following business requirements.
  Shared product catalog management
  Convergent billing as a service – MVNE
  Partner management and billing
  Reconciliation of bills. comparison of usage and dispute management
• Orchestrating disparate provisioning requirements across multi play service request –Handling multiple services, quad play, triple play services and products across different customer types and partner chain involves complex provisioning requirements. A convergent provisioning feature shall be available with a flexible adapter based on rule driven configuration to communicate with the network elements and provision the service
• Service and network agonistic Mediation – A convergent mediation platform provides an enterprise-wide platform which could help operators to address the billing mediation, network mediation and data collection challenges across different network elements and partner systems.
• Pricing Flexibility which enables service providers to launch plans on-demand and meet varying customer demands
• And finally the availability of the system 24 X 7 X 365 and ability to scale in accordance with subscriber and transaction volume increment

We, at Magnaquest understand the subscription revolution better than anyone else and are geared up to provide solutions to operators to meet their stated /unstated needs so that they are always future ready. To know more on the best practices and ideal solution fit for your business visit us www. experiencesure.com or write to us . We’d love to hear from you.