Get to market faster with compelling products and services. Build market share in a fiercely competitive environment. Monetize any service regardless of payment methods in real-time. Develop, manage and monetize complex partner value chains. Keep your customers happy and loyal while recruiting new ones. Cut costs without impacting business performance. Reduce revenue leakage and limit credit exposures.
These objectives are on every service provider's wish list as they enter a new growth phase characterized by consumer expectations, technological and standards advancements, innovation across a wide range of areas, own evolving role for the service provider and changes in business model.
The service provider community today is shifting from being service- and technology-centric to consumer- and business-centric. Each service provider is increasingly geared toward pursuing innovative strategies to continually drive growth and revenues, improve customer focus based on better analytics, and establish cost control mechanisms to gain operational efficiencies and leverage economies of scale.
While achieving real-time revenue management nirvana for any service might seem elusive given the chaos and upheaval that characterize today's communications industry, it is actually attainable.
The answer lies in transforming passive and outdated back-office charging and billing processes into a unified revenue management system that enables them to revolutionize the way they do business, and rapidly convert transactions into revenue while significantly reducing the operational costs and overall total cost of ownership associated with revenue management solutions.
The choice of real-time revenue management solutions has become strategic and critical.
Fast and flexible
The solution should provide for rapid conceptualization and implementation of new services, as well as for targeted offerings for the segmented customer base to continually differentiate. It should also grab and retain market share for maximizing growth and revenues, considering intense competition and shorter services lifespan.
A fully extensible and convergent real-time solution must also provide inherent capabilities to streamline business processes and technologies regardless of services, payment methods and customer type.
It must allow consumers to manage their balances - including budget controls, transaction limits, and granular prepaid and postpaid options - at the service level. It should also enable customers to view their profiles in their entirety, across services and payment methods, putting the service provider in a better position to up-sell or cross-sell and assess alternate revenue streams such as those from targeted, relevant and contextual advertising.
Managing consumer balances more granularly appeals to the consumer and allows the service provider to better monitor customer spending patterns. This results in reduced credit exposure, improved risk detection, and standardized credit management across the platform.
Diverse capabilities
A fully unified solution can unlock the true value of the service, allowing the full potential of revenues to be realized. It should offer unparalleled marketing and promotion capabilities in real-time that can span any breadth and combination across service types such as wireless, fixed, cable, IP and media on a single platform, as well as payment methods and brands.
The solution should be able to design personalized, attractive and intuitive pricing capabilities to lure and retain subscribers based on a wide range of parameters associated with the subscriber, product, event and service attributes. This turns the real-time solution into the service provider's competitive weapon.
It should likewise minimize fraud, revenue leakage and bad debt through real-time service authorization. A fully convergent real-time platform can authenticate customers and determine their levels of service and privileges with a transactional, real-time architecture.
This architecture provides performance-optimized network interfaces engineered for low latency and high throughput, supports IMS-ready DIAMETER interface along with RADIUS and provides high availability and reliability for real-time needs. Its massive scalability can minimize fraud, reduce risk and exposure to bad debts by enabling real-time credit management across all customers, and controls access rights based on policies within its own database or by accessing external databases.
Coupled with the ability to ensure transaction integrity with real-time verification, reporting and analysis for all events and actions, the real-time platform can provide comprehensive revenue assurance, minimize losses and ensure all customer-facing activities are completed with integrity.
Accurate audit and settlement
With settlement processes moving from a monthly to daily or real-time activity, it is important to have accurate royalties and revenue-sharing tracked and assured in real-time.
The solution should provide an updated and accurate picture of partner accounts receivables and accounts payables, as well as make it easy to issue partner statements and avoid or resolve disputes and delays in payments.
It should give accurate, real-time capture and application of revenues to customer and partner accounts as services are consumed on the network. This will enable service providers to have an up-to-date view of revenues, receivables, insights into customer profitability, service profitability and overall health of the business.
Real-time revenue management is a strategic and competitive weapon in the race to become the ultimate one-stop shop for information, communications and entertainment services.
By choosing the right solution that is fully convergent and open standards-based, service providers can change revenue management from a passive, silo-based back-office function to an active, service-agnostic, horizontal business solution that can monetize any service and the value chain. This will drive revenues and margins, enable new revenue streams and provide superior customer service and experiences.