Real-Time Revenue Mgmt Ensures Transaction Integrity

Get to market faster—with compelling products and services. Build market share in a fiercely competitive environment. Monetise any service regardless of payment methods in real-time. Develop, manage and monetise complex partner value chains. Keep your customers happy and loyal while acquiring new ones. Cut costs without impacting business performance. Reduce revenue leakage and limit credit exposure.

And keep an eye on all these, as it happens, in real-time. These objectives are on the wish list for every service provider today as they enter a new growth phase characterised 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 its focus from being service- and technology- centric to consumer- and business- centric. Each service provider is increasingly geared towards pursuing innovative strategies to continually drive growth and revenues, improved 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 characterise 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The answer lies in transforming passive and outdated back-office charging and billing processes into a unified revenue management system that enables service providers to revolutionise the way they do business, and rapidly convert transactions into revenue while significantly reducing the operational costs and overall total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with revenue management solutions.

The choice of real-time revenue management solutions has thus, become strategic and critical. Let us consider in detail what should be the key tenets that real-time revenue management solutions must possess in order for service providers to succeed in next generation environments.

Faster Time to Market

The solution should provide for rapid conceptualisation and implementation of new services, targeted offerings for the segmented customer base to continually differentiate, grab and retain market share for maximising growth and revenues, keeping in mind intense competition and shorter lifespan of services.

Flexible Payment Options

A fully extensible and convergent real-time solution must provide inherent capabilities to streamline business processes and technologies regardless of services, payment methods and customer type. Such a solution 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 provide the ability to view a customer profile in its entirety, across services and payment methods, putting the service provider in a better position to up-sell or cross-sell to that customer and assess alternate revenue streams such as those from targeted, relevant and even contextual advertising.

Managing consumer balances more granularly appeals to the consumer and allows the service provider to monitor customer spending patterns better. Ultimately, this results in reduced credit exposure, improved risk detection, and standardised credit management across the platform.

Promotion and Marketing Capabilities

A fully unified solution provides capabilities to unlock the true value of the service and allows the full potential of revenues to be realised. 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. Inherent in the solution should be the ability to design personalised, 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, thus, turning this real-time solution into the service provider’s competitive weapon!

Real-Time Service Authorisation

A fully convergent real-time platform provides capabilities to authenticate customers and determine their levels of service and privileges with a transactional, real-time architecture. This architecture provides performance-optimised 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, and allows for massive scalability to minimise 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 if required.

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, minimise losses and ensure all customer-facing activities are completed with integrity.

Royalty and Partner Tracking

With settlement processes moving from a monthly to daily or real-time activity, it is of paramount importance to have accurate royalties and revenue-sharing tracked and assured in real-time. The solution must be able to provide an updated and accurate picture of partner accounts receivables and accounts payables, as well as make it easy to issue partner statements, avoid/resolve disputes and delays in payments—all enabling reaping of higher-margin revenues.

Real-Time, Accurate Views of Revenue for Management

The solution must provide ability to give accurate, real-time capture and application of revenues to customer and partner accounts as services are consumed on the network. This is to 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. These empower the business to make better and faster decisions in various aspects such as pricing, offers, services, partner agreements and usage. Instead of waiting until accounting cycles are closed and analysis reporting is completed, such real-time views help lower opportunity costs.

Conclusion

By choosing the right real-time revenue management solution that is fully convergent and based on open standards, service providers can change revenue management from a passive, silo-based back-office function to an active, service-agnostic, horizontal business solution that can monetise any service and the value chain to continually drive revenues and margins, enable new revenue streams and provide superior customer service and experiences.

_Vivek Srivastava is director, Solutions and Strategy, Japan and Asia Pacific, Oracle Communications.
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