PROCESS AUTOMATION: The Unmanned Machine

In India, one expects early adoption of self service provisioning by the franchises and business customers, followed by the end customers

Self Service Provisioning allows customers to do everything for themselves 24x7 with zero or minimal manual assistance from the telecom provider. The customer can order new services, make changes to services and cancel services. Thus customers can change their plan types and even find out the expected savings based on their call usage patterns without interacting with any human being. Because of the highly customized nature of each service provider’s back-office systems, 71 percent of spending required to deliver this capability will be based on custom development and integration and 29 percent will be for packaged-application software.

The Users

Self service provisioning will not only help the customer to decide which service plan is best suited for his/her usage but also help change the plan. As there is no manual intervention, the change can be made effective in minutes instead of days or weeks.

Self service provisioning will be used by franchises, business customers and end customers. In India, one expects early adoption of these services by the franchises and business customers, followed by the end customers. The franchises will be heavy users of these services as it will enable them to operate in a more efficient manner, thereby bringing down their costs and increasing
profitability.

The Benefits

Reduce Costs: Due to increasing competition, telecom providers are facing tremendous pressure on margins. Inability to reduce costs will threaten their very survival. Call-center costs can be reduced as customers will be able to carry out a majority of the provisioning activities by themselves–without any manual intervention from the call-center operators. While the average salary of a call center operator in India is
Rs 10,000 per month, the cost to the company is 3—4 times as much. 

These additional costs include infrastructure, transportation, insurance and training. Today, the subscriber/operator ratio is around 500 in the wireless market. The only way to increase this ratio (and thereby reduce costs) is for telecom providers to go in for self service provisioning and reduce load on the call-center operators.

The cost of acquisition of a new wireless customer can be as high as Rs 3,000. Thus a mobile operator aiming to add one million new subscribers in 2003 can expect to spend as much as Rs 300 crore as acquisition costs. A 50 percent reduction can result in savings of Rs 150 crore. The cost of answering a call from a business customer can vary from Rs 200 to Rs 300.

This can be brought down to less than Rs 50 if the customer uses self service provisioning.

Increase Operational Efficiency: The time required to order/change/cancel a service can be brought down significantly. This will help increase profitability as the customer starts using the new service at an earlier date. Provisioning three days earlier, on average, can increase revenue by 1 percent.

Reduce Time for New Services: One of the major costs associated with adding new services is the training, which needs to be given to the call-center operators. This has both time and cost implications. Self service provisioning will enable the provider to launch new services quickly as only a smaller number of the operators need to be given training.

This also increases the competitiveness of the telecom provider, as it is able to respond to competition faster.

Value-added Services: Value-added services like registering for cricket scores, airline arrival departures, selection of roaming operators and stock updates can be automated. These are typically high margin services and launching them quickly and efficiently enables a telecom service provider to achieve higher profitability.

Cross-sell Products: While a customer may access a website or an interactive voice recording (IVR) to get information about his bill, it gives the service provider an excellent opportunity to cross-sell other products and services. Thus highly targeted campaigns for existing customers can be carried out with minimal additions to existing infrastructure.

Increase Customer Loyalty: self service provisioning enables the customer to interact at a time and in a manner that is convenient for the customer. Thus a customer should be able to pay his bills using his credit card or direct debit. Most service providers are now offering both wireline and wireless services. Consolidated bills as well as rewards on total customer spend will help to ensure customer loyalty and increases customer retention.

Implementing It

Now that we have examined and studied the benefits of self service provisioning, let us look at the
information technology infrastructure requirements for providing these services.

Multiple Access Channels: The IT infrastructure should enable the customer access his account and services from multiple channels. Thus while the customer would like
cricket scores and stock market alerts delivered to his mobile, he may prefer to use the Web for making bill payments. IVR could be used for inquiry on usage and bill amounts. E-mail
can be used for sending electronic copies of bills as well as providing information on new schemes launched by the service provider.

Personalization: The IT infrastructure should enable the service provider and the customer to personalize the look and feel of the information provided. Thus based on the login, end customers, business customers, and franchisees should be given access to different screens and functionalities. It also provides the service provider an ideal medium to track customer behavior as well as launch new campaigns. Test launching of new services can also be done via the web.

Security: Provisions for secure socket layer (SSL) communication, digital certificates, integration with LDAP servers and devices for generating passwords need to be integral components of the application infrastructure.

Integration with Back-end Systems: This is a critical requirement of self service provisioning. The multiple-access channels need to be integrated to the back-end systems like billing, provisioning, fulfillment and order management. The integration needs to be both online as well as asynchronous. Asynchronous integration helps loose coupling of the back-end systems and reduces inter-dependency between the systems. This also enables addition of new systems with minimal impact on the existing infrastructure.

Business Process Automation: This facility enables the service provider to define business
rules and processes in a dynamic fashion to meet competitive threats as well as launch new services
quickly. Thus new products can be packaging existing services in new and creative ways to appeal to the customers.

Payment Gateways: The service provider needs a secure and reliable way to communicate with third-party financial institutions to process the payment requests of their customers. Payment gateways can be used for this communication and are an essential part of the IT
infrastructure.

Scalability and Reliability: A typical telecom service provider has millions (in some cases over 10 million) customers. Scalability is a key requirement here as these customers access the self service provisioning system. The system should be capable of handling millions of transactions per day. It is also important that the system has 24x7 availability as well as optimum and consistent sub-second response times. 

Custom Development: The IT infrastructure should enable fast and easy development of custom applications, which can be easily integrated into the telecom ecosystem. Popular languages like Java, C/C++ should be supported for development of these applications.

Application Platform Suites offer functionalities like a portal for personalization and multiple-channel access, middleware for enterprise application integration, workflow engines for defining and executing business processes as well as environments for building scalable and reliable applications using Java or C/C++. 

The self service provisioning model will thus help operators reduce cost, increase profits, provide better service and increase customer loyalty and retention.

Dhruv Singhal, practice manager (consulting), BEA Systems