Convergys on Capturing the Content Brass Ring

The market is attractive enough that everyone wants to grab a piece of the pie. But, as communications service providers develop their content market-capture roadmaps, they must not lose sight of prudent business practices — deploying new services and convergent bundles in a timely and low-cost manner, minimizing operations costs by increasing efficiency and eliminating rework, and ensuring loyalty by raising customer service responsiveness to new levels. With these practices in place, communications service providers can begin to execute their pursuits of the content brass ring.

Getting in on the Action

• There are at least four strategies from which communications service providers can choose to deliver content-based services to their customers:
• Become a content creator themselves
• Purchase content from a third-party provider
• Partner with content providers
• Host the services

The first two options are daunting — each requires significant up-front investment with no guaranteed payback, and the first option guarantees a long lead-time prior to service availability. Risk and reward are shared between the communications service provider and the content provider under the third option, while the fourth option shifts the balance of risk back onto the communications service provider’s shoulders.

On paper, partnering appears to be the most viable option, and recent announcements of relationships between BT and Yahoo, and SBC and EchoStar support that position. However, partnering is not a panacea for communications service providers. The convergence of content and communications raises service complexity to new heights, in terms of how services are defined (for example, product rules), how services are supported throughout business support systems (BSSs), and the interactions required with partners supplying the content.

Communications service providers simply cannot address these complexities with a legacy BSS environment whose components were neither developed nor deployed with the delivery of content-based services in mind. Significant upgrades to the BSS are necessary prior to service launches to meet the ongoing demands of customers for single bills and convergent billing, as well as to solve the issues surrounding settlements with the content providers.

At first blush, the alternatives available to communications service providers for dealing with their legacy BSS shortcomings are unacceptable. Following the status quo of introducing new systems to support new services results in a stovepipe environment that is costprohibitive to develop and maintain. A wholesale replacement of the legacy BSS with state-of-theart systems designed to handle content-based requirements produces a logistical nightmare that jeopardizes the entire operation, most notably service delivery.

Further examination reveals a solution — an orderly transition through intelligent augmentation, consolidation and evolution of the legacy BSS. Despite the shortcomings of the legacy BSS, leveraging these systems to the maximum possible extent through an approach that promotes discrete, modular investments is the surest path to ultimately deploying a converged BSS. To successfully transition from the legacy BSS environment to one that truly supports the convergence of content and communications, the communications service provider’s initial investments must be directed toward the functions that comprise the four cornerstones of convergence.

The Four Cornerstones of Convergence

Product Management uses a logical common product model with common rules-driven processes for product definition and data synchronization to link disparate systems. The result is the introduction of a new service one time that crosses all systems, accelerating service deployment, ensuring the integrity of product data and effectively supporting the rollout of convergent bundles.

Customer Management enables a single view of the customer and of partners for the rollout of value-chain services by delivering integrated support across the channels of interaction, including customer service, customer self-care and partner management. As a result, customer service representatives can view accurate and upto- date account, order, service, trouble and billing data through a single front-end interface. This improves productivity, while at the same time ensuring customer expectations are met at a lower overall cost.

Fulfillment Management automates the order-to-cash cycle by tightly coupling workflow with order management, inventory management and service activation to drive the configuration, management and activation of services across the network. As a result, order re-entry is eliminated, order fallout is reduced, asset utilization is optimized and the provisioning lifecycle is shortened.

Revenue Management allows for service independence by capturing and rating all billable network events, regardless of service type, technology or bundling. As a result, provisioning and billing are synchronized and partner settlement can be executed quickly and accurately, promoting revenue maximization.

These four functions are the cornerstones of convergence, not only because each delivers capabilities the service provider’s BSS must possess, but also because of the interrelationships among the cornerstones collectively: fulfillment success starts with product definition; customer loyalty is earned through accurate and timely fulfillment; and revenue attainment is predicated upon fulfillment and loyalty.

Tom Antunes is vice president in charge of marketing for billing products and services at Convergys Corp. He can be reached at tom.antunes@convergys.com.

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