6 essential points to consider when choosing a BSS suite for your business

By: Omar Abdul-Hafiz

The telecommunications industry is one of the biggest and most competitive sectors in the world today. It is characterized by a complex and interwoven grid of providers and business partners that all contribute to the overall value of the final product. In other words, instead of the traditional value chain, we are now looking at something more of a value fabric.

In light of this, a plethora of factors go into running a thriving and successful telecom business, and talking about them all could go on almost ad infinitum. But perhaps one of the most important elements of success in telecom would be implementing a powerful BSS software suite that best caters to the specific needs of your telecom enterprise.

As such, there are numerous BSS solutions available in the market, and many of them are quite effective to a certain extent. However, very few of them account for the essential features that need to be in every BSS solution. Given the dynamic changes in the industry today, the top 6 points that need to be in a Telecom BSS software suite are comprehensiveness, adherence to industry standards, customer experience, product management, monetization and adaptability by integration. And below is a brief explanation of each one.

Comprehensiveness

Generally speaking, BSS refers to four main pillars through which CSPs (Communications Service Providers) run their business operations. These four pillars are product management, order management, revenue management, and customer management. And one of the biggest challenges facing telecom companies nowadays is in finding a BSS solution that caters to all these four in seamless harmony.

To overcome this challenge, telcos tend to incorporate a bunch of systems from separate providers and then are forced to go through the hassles of integrating all these systems together. This solution often entails the risk that these separate systems were not designed to work with each other, to begin with, and this poses a threat of system failure.

To avoid this threat, it is best to look for one BSS solution that governs all four pillars together within one fully integrated system. Alternatively, expanding your existing BSS suite entails implementing new flexible systems that can seamlessly integrate with your current system base.

Customer experience

CRM is central to your business support system (BSS). Through the years, the telecom industry has been witnessing increasing challenges manifested in issues such as “extreme customer churn”, as well as rising changing behaviors and constantly rising customers’ expectations of service. Operators and CSPs are thus obliged to develop proactive strategies for long-lasting profitable customer relationships.

Considering this, it is no doubt that powerful customer management is the cornerstone of establishing and maintaining a healthy and sustainable customer relationship. And to achieve that, there are several things that could be done. One of these things is having one single interface to manage all the customers’ demands, data, payments, and billing procedures. This is achieved by integration with all the systems managing all the various related operations of your company. In addition, your BSS suite needs to provide flexible multi-channel support, or better, omnichannel support. This would allow you to interact easily with your customers; it also allows them to reach out to you anywhere, anytime whenever they need help or want to provide feedback.

Enhanced product management

The ability to dynamically define and create product offerings is fundamental in Telecom. Today, Telecom operators provide a wide range of bundles containing a diverse combination of products usually spanning more than one domain. This requires flexible product creation capabilities including connection with other departments within the company or from business partners. Inventory, marketing, order management, and customer care are all tasks that fall under the umbrella known as product management.

Product management hence involves product planning and then creating a product with a unique value proposition and customer experience to soar up over the competition. What follows would be launching an effective marketing campaign to engage your target audience with this new product. Additionally, seamless collaboration with your order management, workforce, provisioning, and other relevant operations need to be achieved. Therefore, a comprehensive BSS software must account for all aspects of this keystone process.

Monetization

One major challenge in the telecom industry is in monetizing the products and services provided through billing and collections. Today, customers can order a combination of varied products and services and then receive one bill with the overall cost of their orders. Here’s a brief list of the main features that must be available in any powerful billing and collections system:

• Coping with product diversity: Just as product diversity necessitates the adoption of a dynamic and flexible product management system, it also requires the implementation of a powerful convergent billing and charging system. This is important for enabling common real-time management of products and services provided by multiple vendors.
• Lifecycles and scenarios: The system must provide the ability to create systematic lifecycles and dynamic scenarios based on the specific details of the different billing & collection cases.
• Different collection methods: The customer should be allowed to pay through a payment channel that they find most convenient to them. This can either be through bank debit orders, credit cards, bank transfers or integration with 3rd party payment platforms. This element is especially effective for preventing involuntary churn.

Ideally, the customer would pay their bill within the timeframe, but this is not always the case. Delinquency in payment happens all the time and for all kinds of reasons, and dealing with hundreds or thousands of delinquent customers can be quite cumbersome.

The best solution for this is to provide a feature-rich platform for monitoring and controlling all collection processes, as well as the performance of collectors and lawyers within one comprehensive dashboard. Additionally, the platform needs to support performing mass transactions and monitoring back-end jobs.

Adaptability

By adaptability, we mean the ability of the BSS system to connect and interact with other related systems, including third-party systems, hassle-free. For example, seamless integration with other BSS, and OSS, systems is imperative in Telecom. Moreover, back-office integration provides Telecom operators with efficient workflow and boosts productivity. Successful marketing and business development require easy interaction with social media platforms. The high complexity of the value fabric in the telecom industry makes this all the more vital.

Adherence to standards

In the telecom industry, the importance of standards adherence cannot be stressed enough. CSPs usually end up with a number of providers for their software systems. This is due to the many and disparate business processes a telecom operator is required to perform. Having numerous systems from multiple providers can pose a risk of disrupting your business flow due to problems in integration among these systems. Therefore, implementing systems that adhere to industry standards is crucial. This is to enable systems from various vendors to easily connect creating collaborative end-to-end business operations.

The most well-known standards for CSPs today are those developed and maintained by TM Forum. TM Forum is a global industry association for service providers and their suppliers in the (tele)communications industry. A big part of achieving successful digital transformation in your business depends on choosing a BSS software that fully abides by these practices and standards.

Given these pivotal features, a Telecom operator will be better off knowing that the BSS suite of their choice would truly help their business excel in such a perilous and competitive industry.

For more information, please take a look at ESKADENIA’s assortment of Telecom products.