Redknee has been making headlines with its bold acquisition of NSN’s BSS business. Tony Poulos recently quizzed Redknee CEO, Lucas Skoczkowski on what can be expected from the new combined entity. Video courtesy Juliet Media and TelcoProfessionals.com
Read More »If you’re one of those people that always pays your bill late, but in full, your service provider loves you. See, that late fee you end up paying is pure profit. It makes you an extra special customer. So operators of all sorts want to be smarter about making a distinction between you – the extra profitable customer – and the delinquent payers who end up being disconnected. If you’re paying a late fee, you’re basically upping your ARPU without consuming any extra services. And chances are pretty good that if you’re treated well, you
Read More »You know how some people look like zombies after too much plastic surgery? That’s kind of like billing. Coming out of the recent ETIS gathering in Athens, my esteemed colleague Mr. Leslie proposed that with the rise of real-time will come the death of post-paid billing as we’ve known it. Could be. But I wondered if maybe real-time technology actually could breathe new life into billing. So, I jumped on the phone with MATRIXX Software CEO Dave Labuda to try and figure it out. First, Labuda points out that real-time billing is still typically housed
Read More »Pay TV models are evolving more rapidly than infrastructure can keep up. In simple terms, Pay TV customers have gone rapidly from faceless households to unique individuals. Personalization is in its infancy; content owners are concerned about maintaining content rights; and Pay TV providers are working through the details on how revamp advertising models and the best ways to monetize services like TV Everywhere. BillingViews sat down with Dwayne Ruffin, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy for CSG International to discuss the massive changes occurring in the global Pay TV industry and how they are
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Network outsourcing is a growing trend in the communications industry because it provides operators with a way to offload some of their capital burden in the face of explosive bandwidth demand. Communications providers want to move up the value chain. To some extent this means getting out of the business of building, operating, and maintaining networks in lieu of focusing on creating products and caring for customers. But in doing so, will they sacrifice an inherent competitive advantage in the digital economy? “4G will shake things out,” says Keith Willets, Chairman of the TM Forum
Read More »The industry is divided on whether NFC is the foundation of mobile payments, …. or much more. BillingViews asked the industry.
Read More »BillingViews talked to a senior IT Manager at a North American carrier. He was in the middle of a major system conversion. The billing system had been built in-house many years previously and the reluctance to change was huge. But, as the business expanded and developed multiple services the flaws began to show. There was no single view of the customer and there were embedded ‘silos of thought’. What were the critical success factors? The impetus from the CEO who saw customers suffering, costs increasing and the agility of the business being impaired. What was the most
Read More »First published in 2011 BillingViews had the opportunity to catch up with a communications professional that has experience of billing vendor, media and service provider environments. He was involved in conversations some years ago about how to monetise new services. We started talking about advertising – an area that he is currently focused on. It seems strange that service providers should have advertising teams – good but strange. That’s true, but nowadays communications companies are moving towards having a portfolio of services, media channels and companies that together provide great scope for generating revenue from
Read More »I nearly began to swear recently while listening to a radio interview because an overconfident hype-slinger promised we’d all have location-aware, personalized marketing pushed to our smart phones in a week or two. The audacity of his assurances irked me; they are easy to make to lay audiences that can’t refute them. Those in the know realize we’re still a few steps away from true “right offer, right time” capabilities. Comptel’s Antti Koskela and I had a spirited chat about this issue in the context of Comptel’s acquisition of Finnish real-time analytics developer Xtract. An
Read More »Customer Experience is extremely tangible from the customer’s perspective; but the forces that shape and affect it can be more ephemeral. The relationship between operational processes and customer experience isn’t always easy to measure or define, but operators are beginning to improve in doing just that. According to Sanjay Kumar, industry vice president – communications & media, for Progress Software, “more than 60 percent of [operators’] costs are associated with exceptions or variations that happen along the way. Much customer churn is a result of what happens in that space.” The customer experience is built
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