Transformation is a regular, on-going activity in any telecom’s life. And by the way, when I say “transformation” I’m not just talking about those “big bang” transformations that impact your entire organization. Lots of mini-transformations are going on too. In fact, history shows that at any point in time about 25% of operators are involved in some form of system transformation or another, be it a billing migration, CRM replacement, new network roll out or a major NMS upgrade.
At CVidya, we know these system transformations and network migrations are a big deal: they are major revenue-impacting events. So to highlight their importance we propose a new RA buzzword: transformation assurance.
The issue of data integrity
From a revenue assurance point of view, whenever a transformation occurs, it should raise a big red flag. Why? Because data integrity issues are bound to crop up as you’re moving vital information from a legacy system to something new.
So what needs to be checked? Many things actually. For instance, if it’s a billing system migration, you want to be sure that all price plans and the many attributes of those price plans were copied successfully to the new system. Did all the tariff tables get converted? Did all the business rules move over?
Likewise, in a CRM replacement you want to be sure all subscribers and their profiles were moved over properly – and that subscribers are aligned with the right pricing plans, the product catalog and services. And of course, this same sort of integrity checks apply to any BSS, OSS or NMS system being transformed. And the sources of error are many: anything from complex technical glitches to simple human mistakes. The scale of telecom operations also contributes to problems.
The challenges of LTE launch
When an operator is launching a new LTE network, the data integrity challenge is huge because an entirely new network is coming in. One key area to double check is the information being moved from the HLR to the HSS. The data must be aligned correctly, otherwise subscribers are not receiving services or they are receiving services they are not being billed for.
You also need to ensure that the integrity of porting and mirroring to new network elements is solid. The process is even trickier because LTE brings with it new quality of service-based and consumption-based rating schemes, so those need to be checked as well.
Whenever a variety of network elements come into play like that, not only must the integrity be there, you need to also check for revenue leaks and conduct a margin analysis. Otherwise you could end up provisioning services in unprofitable ways.
Transformation: A perfect time to perform pricing plan optimization
Many operators recognize that transformation is the perfect time to do some system house cleaning. And one particular area that CVidya sees a lot of value in is streamlining price plans. To give you an idea: one mobile operator customer of ours has 52,000 price plans – they haven’t cleaned their price plans for 14 years.
Maintaining such a high number of price plans is very costly. The most obvious cost is the time and effort require to maintain those price lists and make routine rating plan changes to them. Plus, there are many hidden costs such as CSR training, invoice template maintenance, revenue leakage, etc. Another big item is hardware and associated technology costs. Keeping old price plans (especially the ones with minimal amount of customers related to them) on costly servers and storage prevents you from moving them to economical blade servers and disk farms.
But what if you could reduce your number of price lists significantly? Well, from our experience operators can save millions a year in this process.
OK, so what can be done to reduce the number of price lists and optimize the migration of customers in the most optimal way? Well, figuring that out is a fairly complex undertaking. The 10,000 subscribers who sit on a legacy plan should probably be moved to an array of modern rating plans, but randomly moving subs doesn’t work because you need to figure how that movement will impact average revenue per user and subscriber usage.
In short, you need to gain a marketing or price view of your price plan migration. As you well know, billing migration is a huge project that often takes two or three years to complete. And in that time, the billing staff usually has their heads down working with the billing vendor or systems integrator to get the job done. For this reason, I think an outsourcing arrangement makes sense. The pricing plan migration is very straightforward: no need to implement a software product or get trained on it. It’s a service.
One process for paring down price plans could be by analyzing the current situation. For instance, how many subscribers are on each price plan, and what does each price plan include in terms of products, tariffs, services and so on? Only when you know that can you move on to group price plans into families or the categories discovered during the analysis phase. Ideally you want to group together price plans with similar tariffs and services. Another goal is get rid of unprofitable price plans and price plans that very few subscribers are on.
The next phase is to perform deeper analyses on the groups-to-migrate so you can determine what the target pricing plans should be. All these proposed pricing changes are then simulated in the systems so you can measure the impact they will have on your ARPU and network.
In most cases, customers won’t even notice they’ve been moved to the new price plans. In other cases, the operator will incent customers to move to the new plans, perhaps developing a marketing campaign or two for that very purpose so you can begin the gradual process of migrating customers to plans that support your customer experience and profit objectives. Done right, the system or outsource team you hire will be able to calculate “next best action” recommendations for individual subscribers.
Conclusion
Checking for data integrity issue is critical during any transformation activity, but performing data validation checks is easy when there’s a managed services team you can turn to. Likewise, maintaining a huge number of price plans drags the efficiency of your billing shop down. So transformation is the perfect time to tackle that issue too.
Efrat Nissimov is the director of product management in the marketing department in CVidya, responsible for the Revenue Assurance, Fraud Management and Risk Management products and solutions. Nissimov has 17 years of experience in the communications and telecom industry. Prior to joining CVidya, Nissimov worked 10 years in TTI Telecom (now part of TEOCO) as a product manager and solution engineer of the CDRs products. Prior to this position, Nissimov worked in the engineering and operations departments in two leading communication service providers in Israel.
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but we maintain some editorial control to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at: dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
