Telecom Expense Management Featured Article

Prepaid Billing in the Telecom Sphere is Changing

In India, the number of regular telecom subscribers has been steadily increasing in both urban and rural areas. In response, telecom companies are shifting their focus back to prepaid users and are for the most part getting away from the traditional pay-as-you use model. The companies are back to wooing prepaid subscribers who still make up the majority in the Indian telecom market.

This situation has made it necessary for billing solution providers to find new ways to diversify, such as big data, analytics and interactive billing. We live in an electronic age that has given everyone access to a great deal of information. When you combine this with the ever-growing list of devices that are all interconnected and leading us to the Internet of Things (IoT), you will see that data can be gathered from so many different sources.

Billing service providers should be able to take advantage of this as they shift their focus to new verticals like the growing market of machine-to-machine (M2M) transactions. Megasoft Limited is a provider of billing solutions to telecom companies. According to GV Kumar, who is its managing director, “The billing in the telecom sphere is undergoing a sea-change in India as well as global markets. The preference is for charging a fixed price, like cable television subscriptions. We want to offer big data services to provide insights about customer trends and help companies position their services and distribution channels better.”

As customers are given the option of having more and diverse services, there arises a need for a better way to keep track of billing options. CK Shastri, who is chairman and managing director of Intense Technologies, feels that the challenge is to maintain data integrity while trying to provide customers a converged view of their transactions across all services. He said “We have launched interactive billing systems recently that will allow customers to click-pay from the PDFs itself.”

Intense Technologies might have a solution that will help to rein in telecom expenses. It has a digital transformation framework that is called Uniserve. This is designed to enhance the customer experience without the need for a large-scale overhaul of backend enterprise IT. While companies do have a strong presence in the telecom field, many are looking to include banking and financial services, healthcare, and educational institutions as well. It remains to be seen how this market will expand in the coming months.