FEATURE BILLING
There is some debate as to whether or not
this remains the case. Cerillion’s Dominic
Smith is optimistic, revealing that his reading
of the issue has changed in the last two years.
Today, he says, operators have become more
aware of the importance of billing in service
development. Cross functional product
teams within the carriers, he says, will now
be more likely to contain a representative
from the billing division, to advise colleagues
on the challenges they may face in taking
their service to market. This is essential, he
argues, because billing departments have
historically been made nervous by the level
of flexibility afforded the marketing department
in service development.
Eric Hatton is decidedly more downbeat.
“There is no real strategic thinking about
billing within the operators,” he says, arguing
that vendors lead the thinking, in response
to the urgent time to market requirements of
the carriers. When a new service launches and
is offered to market for free in the first few
months’ of availability, Hatton says, it is not
because the operators are trying to stimulate
usage of the service among cost-conscious
customers. More often than not, in reality,
the service is free because the carrier hasn’t
figured out how to get the billing system to
charge for it.
Time to market is crucial, he argues, returning
to the importance of real time billing. Operators
cannot afford to wait several months
for the implementation of a new service or
incentive scheme. “As an industry we are maturing
to the point where we are able to make
offers and change the tariffs and bonuses
more quickly. In days and weeks, rather than
months, and even by the hour.”
Much as a supermarket might introduce
an offer one afternoon in response to excess
stock building up, carriers are going to need
to be nimble and highly reactive. Offering
their users a discounted, additional bundle
of text messages, or free calls at a public
event will prove an effective weapon in the
battle against churn, says Hatton, and only
genuine flexibility in the billing division will
allow this to happen.
Consolidation has hit the billing community
much as it has affected the rest of
the industry’s supply side. And it’s not just
the pure billing players getting involved.
Ever keen to broaden their offerings and tie
in their customers, the network equipment
players are looking to play in the billing
space. Most recently, Ericsson bought LHS
40
Consolidation has hit the
billing community much as it
has affected the rest of the
industry’s supply side. And
it’s not just the pure billing
players getting involved
and now incorporates the billing player’s
products into its own portfolio.
Unsurprisingly, the billing specialists are
unconvinced that the big kit vendors will be
able come to dominate their territory. “The
track record of equipment vendors selling
software is not a great one,” says Comptel’s
Olivier Suard. “We’ve seen it before; I
was part of Kenan when it was bought by
Lucent in 2000 for $1.6bn. They sold it two
or three years later for about a quarter of
that amount.”
“We’ll probably see more consolidation
between network vendors and billing vendors,”
says Dominic Smith, refusing to rule
out the prospect of some of that consolidation
involving Cerillion. “But that’s the next
natural step in terms of the convergence of
payment methods and real time processing
that we’re seeing at the moment.”
The mobile billing sector, like the rest of
the industry, is in constant evolution, both
in terms of its corporate structure and the
development of its products. While some of
the more advanced operators are in the early
stages of offering some of the capabilities
discussed here, converged billing is really
still in its infancy.
By Eric Hatton’s judgement it will take
between 18 months and two years for the
first stage—the merging of postpaid and
prepaid models—to become widespread.
“It’s very complex and that’s one of the reasons
why, although everybody says there are
convergent systems out there commercially,
there really isn’t.”The billing nirvana of
one bill for every service, and every service
available in every billing format, he says,
remains further down the line, perhaps as
far as five years out.
But, says Olivier Suard, it will happen.
Carriers should look to supermarket chains
for best practice in billing, Suard suggests.
Going forward, a telecoms customer might
choose a different provider for a conference
call than for his or her standard service. But
if operators were modelled on supermarkets,
which house a variety of providers’ products
under one central brand, they would be able
to retain the business.
“There is a lot to learn from the supermarkets
and retailers about how they manage
their customer relationships, how they upsell,
how they convince me to buy something I
hadn’t planned to buy and keep me going into
that shop. Converged billing is a big part of
that,” he says.
As mobile operators increasingly find
themselves competing with handset vendors,
content owners and retail brands for ownership
of the customer, you will often hear them
reassuring themselves with the fact that it is
they who bill the customer. A unique monthly,
weekly or sometimes daily commercial interaction
with the customer puts the operator in
a unique position in the value chain.
Billing may not be as sexy as the gadgets
and applications that choke the stands at
major industry exhibitions but it’s evolution
is just as—if not more—important. The bill
is a crucial point of communication with the
end user, one that always gets checked and one
that could please as well as it can frustrate,
if used correctly. �
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