Really, Its Time for Real Time

that telecom companies are becoming more customercentric and rolling out personalized services. But that shift in thinking sends ripples through the network and the back office too, impacting billing ideology and driving real-time requirements like never before.

The networks are changing and many carriers have convergence and IMS strategies, says John Trembley, director of business development at Oracle Corp. The question is now, what will we do with this and how can we give access to any service, across any network and on any device, while enabling any form of payment? So this naturally takes us to a customer-centric philosophy.

Enabling a multiplicity of payment options is a key aspect of the new realtime billing paradigm. A fundamental shift in the market, for instance, is offering blended prepaid and post-paid functionality within a single account, giving operators an opportunity to increase ARPU within a household. Prepaid used to be looked down upon as something for the credit-challenged, but now it doesnt really represent a category of people but rather a set of desires, says Trembley. The late-teens-toearly- 20s demo[graphic] is the last untapped market for wireless, and often theyre on a family account that prefers prepaid to ensure cost controls. But the parents are post-paid.

Offering customers a comprehensive look at that household account requires real-time functionality to track the usage across service type it also requires a re-architecting of systems. Ironically, prepaid customers have been the early benefactors of realtime information to their handsets, keeping them aware of their remaining balances, explains Jack Storer, director of business development, Intec Telecom Systems plc. But this was easy to do because it didnt rely on customer care and billing; rather, it received this from a typical pizza box dumb prepaid system. Now, prepaid applications have been moved to the edge of what was once considered the back office, where it now can be integrated with other billing information to provide customers with a total view of all their activities, he says.

Beyond prepaid and post-paid integration, real-time billing enables more complex combo-pay plans. Thus, a user can have post-paid wireless voice, prepaid ringtones and wireline longdistance sent to a corporate account and so on. The potential for mixing and matching availability of services and payment is staggering, Trembley says. But you have to get to real time first.

The inherent capabilities of nextgeneration services also are driving realtime billing, opening up innovation when it comes to presentment and crafting oneto- one billing relationships.

For instance, telcos can deliver billing and account information via the television, via solutions such as Intecs offering that allows service providers to offer their customers a TV-based electronic interface for billing disputes.

Service providers also can enable consumers used to self-service for other IP services to create different accounts for each viewer, with preset spending limits on each for on-demand content purchases. A service provider could offer a buddy list type of feature that would allow individuals, such as babysitters, to have on-demand content billed to their own accounts while away from home.

Taking this personalized relationship further, the introduction of content and ondemand services means there will be a need at the time of consumption to calculate how much it costs, says Amdocs Vice President of Marketing Mike Couture. Its not the same for every person. Crossservice discounts require real time.

Operators also need real-time billing for the purpose of tracking usage. For instance, if wireless users sign up for big buckets of post-paid minutes, the service provider has to keep up with the data so that it can trigger events like overage charges.

One potential to truly differentiate is using push technologies, such as allowing customers to define the triggers and thresholds to initiate a text message that is pushed to them, with specific info, says Intecs Storer. For example, I may want to be notified when my family-shared minutes are used up, and how much each family member has used. This requires a real-time rating infrastructure that can immediately trigger the message once a threshold has been breached.

Theres more to it than increasing customer satisfaction. A real-time back office also allows service providers to become more efficient. Today, most service providers honor service requests right away but the charges start with the next billing cycle, says Oracles Trembley. Now well start to see them become more nimble, so charges show up a couple hours later, and theyll get paid sooner.

Those providers that have adopted a real-time strategy can be more nimble as well. A real-time infrastructure will enable them to roll out new services rapidly and implement new business rules that can be easily integrated with a wide variety of devices through open APIs.

Despite the benefits, moving to a realtime back office is easier said than done, and many service providers have yet to do so. The lag is perhaps most evident when it comes to bill presentment.

It is typically the same information on a paper invoice replicated on the Web, says Storer.

Also, many providers rating systems are still batch-oriented, meaning push- type billing features are impossible to implement. Some wireless companies state that the balances they are displaying on your phone may not show your activities from the past two-to-five days, or roaming calls from the past two-to-10 days, says Storer.

Unfortunately, rectifying the situation often requires a complete overhaul of the back office in general, Trembley says. Customer-centricity means that order management, customer care, provisioning and billing all need to be realigned because these are usually housed within legacy silos. For real-time billing to finally take root, it has to talk to the network and understand what each subscriber is doing. Its a difficult job, and you need open, scalable systems, he says.

Service providers need to find a way to consolidate the data from multiple systems to provide a unified, accurate view of customer activity. Thus, some orchestration is needed. If the customer does action A, then it ripples down through the layers to ensure the bill is correct, says Trembley. So we need to enable end-to-end processing and integration between the IT (order entry, CRM) plane and the network plane. Theres a need for middleware to bridge the data store and the application trying to access it.

All systems and processes will be reduced and realigned eventually, says Couture. Its a journey and were not there yet, but this change in billing and the back office is driven by a need to offer a broader range of services to users, he says. Thats the direction everyone has to move in.