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Prepaid Services - Customer Self-Care
& Service Provisioning
One of the most dramatic trends in the communications market in recent years
is the growth and popularity of Prepaid Services with both Service providers
and Customers, most noticeably in the wireline calling card and wireless market
sectors.
Key drivers for Service Providers are:
•
Optimised revenue stream
for Service Providers
•
Reduced cost of receivables
and collections management
•
No need to verify customer
credit status or refuse to provide service
Key growth drivers for Customers are:
•
Predefined (and self-imposed)
credit limit
•
Customer can remain anonymous
•
Service viewed as a commodity
(e.g. can be bought or sold as a present)
•
Flexibility
-
No
contractual commitment to the Service Provider
-
Customer
can change Service provider with no inconvenience
As a result of this dramatic initial growth, many industry analysts believe
that in the coming years the penetration of Prepaid services will overtake
that of postpaid communications services.
This represents a major technological challenge
for service Providers in the area of Customer Self-Care
and Service provisioning.
Traditional Postpaid Provisioning and Customer Self-Care systems are architecturally
in appropriate for prepaid systems. A new generation of system implementations
are required to address this unique set of challenges.
Customer Self-Care
Since the customer can (and in many
cases will) choose to remain anonymous, Service provider marketing strategies
must be implemented accordingly.
Service providers must provide multiple
product types to address specific market sectors with different usage and
spend patterns (e.g. students living away from home, customers with relatives
living abroad).
Key to evolving these marketing strategies
is the ability to determine the value of a given customer. The information
which must be tracked includes:
•
Cumulative spend (including
all recharges)
-
Tracked
by recharge and balance tracking
•
Methods of Recharge (e.g.
POS, Voucher-based, IVR etc…)
•
Calling patterns
-
Tracked
by combinations of CDRs and IN Balance Event records
•
Products / tariffs used
•
Customer service take up
and modification
•
Web-enabled usage histories
Service Provisioning
The key challenges presented by service provisioning are in the greater degree
of integration that is required between:
•
Front office Customer Self-Care
systems / web front ends, and
•
Network / IN platforms
For example where a customer logs onto their self-care web page and wishes
to check their balance, the query must be sent direct to the IN platform in
order to provide an accurate answer. Simply checking the Account balance tracking
in the customer care system is inadequate.
This requires a high performance interface between the front office systems
(billing, CRM etc.) and the network in order to be able to execute such service
sensitive queries in real-time and to cope with the large volume of query
and recharge / reload transactions that are inevitable in such implementations.
For example, where CSR in a call centre retrieves a customer record to handle
a customer call, key information required is:
•
Current balance on the account
•
Any outstanding recharges
•
Payment history and audit
In order to address these requirements, the call centre must be directly integrated
with the network such that each customer record retrieval from the database
invokes a query to the network IN platform to query the current account balance.
This level of integration goes beyond that of traditional Postpaid Billing
and Customer Care systems.
In order to provide effective customer self recharge, payment processes must
be fully integrated with provisioning, e.g. where a POS payment or call centre
credit card payment is successful, the credit is automatically provisioned
into the IN platform in one transaction thus allowing the customer to immediately
use the service. Delays are unacceptable since delays may persuade the customer
to choose another service provider for an important call or transaction.
TeleCARE Prepaid supports all of the above
functionality and more. Typical Prepaid Service provided by TeleCARE are:
•
Prepaid Calling Cards
•
Prepaid Indirect Access
•
Prepaid Indirect Access
To receive a Customer Self-Care and Service Provisioning
white paper please fill out the form below:
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