We all know that functionalities such as billing, rating and charging, customer experience, customer care, CRM, fulfillment, and revenue management are handled by Business Support Systems (BSS). A digital BSS stack goes beyond these functions to facilitate enabling, monetizing and managing a new class of digital services and partner collaboration. It helps transform a communications service provider (CSP) into a digital service provider (DSP) and is essential for the transition to 5G. Here, we analyze how a robust growth-enabling digital BSS solution can become a profit generator.

Predicting customer churn

Telecom companies can leverage advanced analytics to seek value from data residing in the BSS, OSS, and CRM, among others. By leveraging data gathered from customer usage, transactions, complaints, billing, and social media, predictive models can be built to identify potential churners. This, in turn, helps telecom companies roll out offers, promotions, and services to win and keep loyal customers.

Promoting a personalized customer experience

Digital users accept nothing short of unique, personalized experiences. By implementing a digital BSS stack, telecom companies can capture interaction data and create targeted customer interactions. Whether it is the need to address network issues, reward loyalty, or recommend offers, they can leverage AI and deep learning to meet real-time customer demands. Additionally, BSS data, network data, and performance data can be integrated to get a 360-degree view of the customer, giving them the necessary insights to create targeted offers that increase both ARPU and customer satisfaction.

Establishing innovative service lines

Cloud-based services are an increasingly important part of any provider’s offerings. Not only is their appeal becoming clear to consumers, but businesses are increasingly utilizing cloud-based services to enable ease of communication to employees across the globe. A robust BSS offering allows operators to bundle cloud-based services into more traditional offerings easily, ensuring that providers can both increase ARPU and be seen as innovative operators.

Promoting agility and increased efficiency

A robust BSS solution that is itself cloud-based can offer businesses the agility necessary to support emerging technologies. For IoT and M2M systems, for example, a cloud-based BSS allows providers to effectively sync and juggle the multitude of partnerships entailed in these complex new systems. As emerging business opportunities emphasize agility in a shifting and complex marketplace, a cloud-based BSS solution presents the only way to allow businesses to manage and create partnerships and products the instant opportunities arise.

In a rapidly evolving marketplace, characterized by shifts in technology and consumer lifestyle, successful companies will seize opportunities the moment they arise. In order to do so, they must utilize a BSS solution that can effectively extract insights from network intelligence by leveraging real-time data analytics, allowing providers to identify and respond to market trends as soon as they arise.

Retaining profitable customers

The cost of acquiring new customer accounts is substantial. Service providers need time to recover these acquisition costs, making it important to retain profitable customers now more than ever. And to do so, it is vital that providers have a complete view of customer habits and history. By integrating BSS and OSS applications, telecom companies can gain a comprehensive view of the customer to make convergent billing, tiered rates, and applicable discounts possible. This way, it becomes easy to analyze the value that customers bring to the business. This empowers the service provider to differentiate offers.

Constantly enhancing average revenue per user

The constant demand to improve ARPU drives telcos to deliver new services that meet customer demands. By integrating customer-facing systems, specifically BSS, with the other systems as well as service delivery mechanisms, telecom companies can inject speed into the launch of new services.

Whether it is a need to accelerate service provisioning, introduce innovative service lines or enhance the customer experience to enhance the bottom line, telcos can leverage a robust and modernized BSS to make these objectives a reality.