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BILLING – BEYOND FEEDS AND SPEEDS |
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How the telecom industry (still) squanders
billions while
shying-away from the ‘real questions’ and opportunities |
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October 2004
- IGB Grant +1 514 849 3508
& Brian Sharwood +1 416 413 9381
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KEY HIGHLIGHTS: |
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- The communications
industry is in the midst of an enormous undertaking to reinvent its billing
processes, practices and deliverables. The new mantras of customer bundles,
discounting, service level risk assurance, and customer audit are driving
migration from the disparate legacy systems of the past into a new billing
paradigm.
- The real challenge to the industry is a re-invention of the customer
relationship given the new potentials of an IP-powered world. When “Feeds
and Speeds” are no longer the products sold, the need for today’s
billing engines with their focus on discounts and bundles will wane.
- Billing customers by traditional “feeds and speeds” can
shackle the imaginations of telecom sales and marketing personnel who
will work
to achieve
goals defined by old metrics.
- Legacy billing systems can make easy work for regulators, but carriers
end up billing to satisfy a regulator, not working in the best interest
of the final
customers. Protecting monopolistic practices is good in theory but
can prevent evolution of new customer relation fundamentals.
- The new customer relationship will not rely on the tired commercial
contracts of the past but instead based on carrier-customer partnering,
and shared
risk/shared reward.
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