“Convergent BSS — Ensuring Customer-Centric IMS”

By Fiona Fulton

As IMS gains momentum in the marketplace, it is widely accepted that the strategic shift to a single unifying control network architecture will transform the way service providers develop and provide communications services. Despite the hype, Operators are rightly excited at the prospect of IMS-driven benefits ranging from new revenue streams to faster speed to market, higher average revenue per user (ARPU), and efficiency gains that reduce costs.Of equal importance is how IMS will revolutionize customer service and support. The market-facing side of IMS must be intertwined with “customer centricity,” a new approach to service that helps ensure differentiable value through customer empowerment. Though customers may never hear the term IMS, they will expect to see its value in the form of customer-focused benefits that include single sign-on for all services, one customer care point-of-contact, personalized price plans, and convenient payment methods.

To achieve customer centricity, IMS must work hand-in-glove with business support systems (BSS) and billing systems. The problem: BSS in place at many service providers were developed in the simpler era of ‘plain old telephone service’ (POTS), and are not up to the task of supporting IMS.

In order to realize the customer-focused model of IMS and deliver scalable support for complex service scenarios, operators must adopt an advanced, network-independent, convergent BSS that meets eight criteria:

· Service convergence and customer segmentation.

· Pricing and charging flexibility.

· Online charging capabilities.

· Turning services into revenue.

· Sophisticated partner management and settlement.

· Conditional settlement.

· Scalability and availability.

· Migration and implementation.

Service Convergence & Customer Segmentation
If IMS is to be a vehicle for service convergence, it can only properly be supported by truly convergent systems that are focused on enhancing the customer experience. At a fundamental level, the BSS and billing system must support all IMS services and provide a single view of a customer’s services, bills, and orders. With a ‘single view,’ operators can adopt a holistic approach to customer management, facilitating more opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, and increase ARPU and loyalty. This approach enables operators to segment customers according to preferences, spending patterns, and identifiable behavior that can be addressed with targeted services. In other words, the customer should no longer be viewed as a household phone line or a SIM card, but as an individual who’s spending and experience needs careful management.

The session-based nature of IMS activities potentially opens the door for more sophisticated use of incentives and rewards. In a scenario where users can see who else from their circle of friends is active in a given session before talking, messaging, and or sharing video, for instance, usage patterns could be monitored and influenced.

Pricing and Charging Flexibility
An IMS-ready BSS and billing system must be able to support any basis of pricing. As operators introduce more sophisticated, content-rich services and session-based activities, so the need for extremely flexible pricing and charging capabilities is becomes paramount. Supporting IMS will thus require:

· A highly flexible rating or charging engine capable of handling all existing pricing criteria and support whatever services may emerge in the future, including value-based pricing models. For example, streamed music purchases, videoconferencing sessions, and interactive games could all be priced by different measures (e.g., by transaction, duration, and levels completed respectively).

· The ability to accommodate quality of service (QoS) factors in pricing models where appropriate. For example, where the quality of a real-time service, such as a streamed video or interactive game, is compromised by network problems, the operator might recompense the customer by authorizing a rebate, also in real time.

· Systems that enable the rapid introduction of new tariffs or the alteration of existing price structures in order to support new services or respond quickly to changing market conditions.

· Comprehensive and easy to apply discounting and bundling capabilities that can be used across products and services in order to provide incentives to subscribers and reward particular usage patterns.

Online Charging Capabilities
Flexibility in charging must also extend to the online environment. By their very nature, real-time, IP-based transactions such as music or video downloads create ‘immediate’ service expectations in the mind of the user. Failure to meet such expectations may result not merely in a lost transaction, but in a lost customer and the loss of any future revenues this implies. It is imperative, then, that online charging systems combine:

· Very fast response times;

· High availability; and

· Advanced credit management facilities.

In addition to giving all users access to the full range of services (bridging the divide between prepaid and postpaid in mobile, for instance), online charging systems need to promote credit management across services. This is especially pertinent for IMS services, where the credit risks, or exposure, for the operator are potentially high due to the expansion in higher-value content services supplied via third-party providers. The operator has to pay the content provider even if the retail subscriber fails to pay for any reason.

The billing system should enable operators to turn services into revenue. On the one hand, this is enabled via full support for real-time transactions, including the ability to check credit balances, charges, discounts, loyalty points and provide authorization in real time before the service can be accessed.

Secondly, in addition to checking customer credit limits, operators will expect online charging systems to offer different parameters on how this credit is used. For example, funds could be reserved when the service is requested, with the actual charge only being made once the service has been delivered –— similar to the procedure used in hotels, where guests’ credit cards are “swiped” when checking in. Pre-advice of charge functionality, which allows customers to see the cost of a service before deciding to proceed, is also required.

Sophisticated Partner Management Aand Settlement
As IMS evolves, much larger numbers of partners will become involved in the delivery of services to the end user. Operators will team with content providers and others to manage specific content and service propositions. As these partnerships grow, so also will the need for support systems. The billing system, for instance, should be able to handle all aspects of service delivery and revenue settlement associated with partner activities.

Settlement and partner management involve more than simply managing revenue flows between parties. The complex value chains that are accompanying the growth of content services offer operators the opportunity to derive income from each transaction. For example, an operator may source content such as a video or an interactive game either directly from the content provider or through a broker. This content would be subsequently supplied to the customer and the revenue settled between all the parties.

Conditional Settlement
Operators also need a billing system that provides “conditional settlement” to manage the disparate retail billing and merchant settlement periods. Conditional settlement enables an operator to settle with merchants conditionally on receipt of consumer payment. When reconciling with merchants, operators can thus minimize cash exposure, or risk, and enhance cash flow by forwarding only those payments that have actually been received from the retail customer.

Scalability and Availability
Rising partner activity and growing service footprints increase the need for high scalability and availability. In the IMS model, rating and billing will be used by all applications. There is little value in investing in functionally-advanced systems if they cannot handle the increased volume of subscribers, higher number of transactions, and content/service provider partners that IMS will inevitably drive.

Scalability needs to be achieved in an operationally efficient and manageable way, including the option of using multiple smaller servers, rather than a huge single server, to reduce costs. Availability needs to be a top priority, as down-time is costly and potentially increases operators’ risk of credit exposure.

Migration and Implementation
Although a few operators have defined a relatively short window to migrate their customers to IMS from their legacy network, the majority will probably need to run legacy and IP/IMS networks in parallel for 10 or more years and adopt a gradual customer migration strategy. The ability of IMS products and systems to co-exist with legacy systems could, therefore, be critical. On the implementation side, it is expected that IMS projects will be very different from previous network upgrades: they are likely to be more complex and involve multiple vendors, magnifying the challenge of managing the implementation. The need for open system architectures and products with published APIs and a proven integration strategy will also increase.

IMS Visions Rest on BSS Realities
The potential of IMS to drive new services, new revenue streams, enhance customer loyalty, and open the way for more cost-efficient support infrastructures is clear. For operators to realize this potential and carve a competitive edge in the emerging IMS environment, however, they need to focus on:

· Customer centricity – by embracing a new way of thinking, or business logic that puts the customer at the center of the operation.

· Capturing revenue – by investing in the support systems that can ‘operationalize’ this new logic.

Put bluntly, there is no point in evolving impressive IMS service delivery and management capabilities if the BSS cannot cope. Access to advanced, network independent, convergent BSS is a necessity. Without IMS-ready and future-proof solutions, operators will be unable to deliver scalable support for complex IMS service scenarios and risk becoming bit-pipe operators. IMS effectively throws down the gauntlet, challenging operators to invest now in order to succeed in the future.

Fiona Fulton is a Market Strategist works within the Convergys (News - Alert) Product Management and Marketing organization as a Market Strategist. She is currently responsible for Convergys’ IMS strategy. Prior to this role, she worked in the marketing, strategy and product development areas within Convergys. She has previously worked in strategic and engineering roles for T-Mobile (One2One) UK and Nortel ( News - Alert) Networks.. For more information, please visit the company online at www.convergys.com.

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