Customer Relationship Management

What is CRM?

CRM is an enterprise wide business strategy designed to learn about customer’s needs and behaviors to organize and manage Customer relationships to maximize profitability and minimize expenses. A well planned CRM can be viewed as a strategic process merging strategy and system to amalgamate information from across the company (sales, marketing, finance, accounting, etc.) to offer a complete view of the customer and develop stronger relationships with them. Information gained from all internal and in some cases, external, sources allows the company to complete a full 360 degree view of their customer in real time.

CRM allows customer facing representatives of the company to have all the information they require to ensure the best customer experience in interactions with your company and opportunities to increase revenues through increased cross and up selling opportunities to competitive positioning tactics.

CRM is focused on the customer from first contact to continued interaction, to gain insight with which to learn their needs and behaviors to ensure revenue maximization through relationship selling (upsell opportunities, customer ranking, etc.).

CRM layer
This layer represents databases that consist of the single customer view, integrated contact/dialogue, customer profile, and content information. This layer also provides for the ability to perform analytics and reporting on the customer experience by using the variety of knowledge gained from all customer activity.

Payments

Payment can refer to the paying or settlement of bills (receiving money from customers), recharging of prepaid balances, and a telecoms service offered to customers - mobile payment or m-payment.

M-payment is a alternative payment method whereby consumers or businesses can pay for goods and services using their mobile phone. There are four common types of m-payment:

• premium SMS-based transactional payments
• direct-to-bill payment
• mobile web payments
• contactless near field communication.

M-payment has been used in developed markets in Europe to pay for services such as parking, m-payment using a direct-to-bill model has utility for business customers in particular since the aggregation of small sums onto a single (telecoms) bill helps avoid the cost of processing expense claims.

Premium SMS is used extensively to pay for content such as ringtones and is a type of "reverse billing".

Closely related to m-payment is Mobile money - a type of mobile service pioneered in developing markets that typically had a less developed banking infrastructure and is now taking off in more mature Western markets. Mobile money enables mobile customers to use the mobile network to remotely transfer money to individuals who do not have bank accounts. It can also be used to pay for goods and services.

Rating

In revenue management, rating is the process of costing a call or service. A rating engine takes the data supplied by a mediation engine and applies rates (monetary values) to these. When calls or data services have been rated, these are then sent to a billing engine which aggregates the charges into bills.

A modern rating system must be able to adapt to constantly changing prices, as well as more complex rating scenarios. For competitive reasons, rate plans may change relatively frequently today, and likewise the rate plan may be complex - having been set up, for example, so that once usage has crossed a certain threshold then a lower rate applies. Likewise other credits, discounts, and special rules may apply and need to be taken into account when rating.

Like mediation, as rating increased in complexity a new breed of standalone, specialist rating vendors came to market. Over time, these have largely been acquired by billing vendor.

Billing Mediation Systems

A billing mediation platform is a system used to convert data of certain datatypes to other datatypes, usually for billing purposes. Billing Mediation Platforms are used mostly by telephone companies, who typically need to process UDRs (Usage Detail Records). In call scenarios UDRs are most often known as CDRs (Call Detail Records), and among broadband carriers they are often referred to as IPDR.

The CDR/UDR datatypes could hold data such as NPX,NPA,Call Duration,peak time flag,call length and this data may be represented in binary formats. The billing mediation platform typically reads this data and converts into common normalized format.

Billing Systems and all other downstream systems, in turn, converts this data to component[its own] understandable format.

Billing mediation platforms get their name from their behavior: they "mediate" between a variety of other systems. In the typical telephone company scenario, the upstream systems (those providing data to the mediation platform) are network elements, such as telephone switches, and the downstream systems (those receiving data from the mediation platform) perform accounting, auditing, archiving, or bill-generation functions. The mediation system collects, collates and prepares data for consumption by the downstream systems, which often accept data only in a limited set of formats.

Typically a mediation platform is used for the following tasks:

1. Collection and validation of CDRs
2. Filtering out of non billing-relevant CDRs
3. Collating
4. Correlation of different input sources CDRs
5. Aggregation of partial CDRs related to the same call
6. Format change and CDRs normalization
7. Business transformation of data

In a telecom billing scenario, mediation is the first step after receiving a CDR. The mediated CDR is forwarded to a rating engine, which calculates the charge associated with the CDRs.In today's world Rating Engines are more becoming necessary for the telecom billing system to meet the growing variant customer needs for different services.^{[citation needed]}

Despite the name, not all of the data transferred via billing mediation platforms is actually used for billing purposes. For instance, the mediation software might generate traffic volume statistics based on the number and origin of the records passing through it. Those statistics could then be used for capacity planning, as part of a network monitoring procedure, or for any other business intelligence applications.

Sophisticated Billing Mediation software from various providers serves end to end functionality for Telecom Operators. Mediation software performs various operation from Collection to Downstream Distribution to modules like Retail Billing, Interconnect Settlement, Business intelligence, Fraud Detection, Revenue Assurance, Test Call Generation. Following list of activities provides an insight on Mediation software activities

1. Collection and Archive
2. Decoding/Encoding
3. CDR Normalization (Common Format)
4. Filtering
5. Conversion
6. Validation
7. Record Enrichment (Using Complex Reference Data)
8. Duplicate Record Detection
9. Aggregation or Correlation
10. Buffering
11. Cloning
12. Sorting
13. Downstream Format Mapping
14. Header and Trailer generation
15. Downstream Distribution
16. Error Messaging and Alarms
17. Auditing and Reports
18. Reconciliation
19. Reference Data Configuration
20. Provisioning services for the subscription.

Complementary to Billing Mediation functions, comprehensive mediation platforms also provide functionality dedicated to Service Provisioning (the two areas frequently intermix as services configured and used by the end customer result in usage data records generation in the network).

Mediating between the systems is not the only job that Mediation Platform can do. Actually this can be used as a provisioning agent. The basic provisioning commands can be configured within the mediation system and whenever we get a request for the system which does the provisioning, the request can be converted into a file , in which mediation can append the service provisioning commands and send it to HLR for activating any request. This of course , load dependent but can come very handy when there is a crisis in the other system.

At core Mediation involves data transfer between various systems with or without modification of data starting Network elements to OSS/BSS systems.

Mediation platforms for Telecom Practice supports various systems:

• Retail Billing
• Wholesale Billing - National and International
• Network Traffic Management
• Data Warehousing
• Reconciliation system
• Fraud Management
• Provisioning Feed to Sub-systems

Telecom operators offer Voice,video,data,fax and internet services to subscribers and partners on various product lines.Mediation products are tuned to provide solutions for complex business challenges.

Mediation

In revenue management, mediation is a process used to collect, validate, filter, collate, correlate, aggregate and convert data to create a data record that can be used for billing purposes. It is the first step in the billing process after collection of data records, and before Rating.

The data records produced by mediation were called Call Detail Records (CDRs), and contained all the necessary parameters to rate and bill a voice call such as call duration, distance, time of day and so on. Latterly, the record has become known as an xDR, IPDR, EDR and so on, to distinguish voice call records from records used to bill data services.

Historically, telecoms switches performed some of the mediation tasks, and mediation was often built into the billing solution. Mediation functions are not typically provided by a router, however. Thus with the move to data networks (packet switching), as well as the introduction of prepaid services and data services, mediation became far more complex. This resulted in a generation of specialist, standalone mediation platforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over time most of these were acquired by billing vendors.

It should be noted, however, that data produced by mediation platforms is often used for non-billing purposes. For example, the mediation software might generate traffic volume statistics based on the number and origin of the records passing through it. Those statistics could then be used for capacity planning, as part of a network monitoring procedure, or for any other business intelligence applications. Other solutions such as Interconnect settlement, Business intelligence, Revenue assurance and Fraud management, Test Call Generation and so on, may use the data provided by a mediation platform.

Revenue assurance and Fraud management

Revenue assurance is the practice of identifying and remedying (sometimes preventing) financial underperformance in CSPs. Due to the complexity of revenue management, the complex nature of telecoms software infrastructure, combined with human error and suboptimal processes, CSPs 'lose' a percentage of revenue owed to them. Revenue assurance software, processes and practitioners seek to minimise these losses to the company and prevent them from occurring.

While revenue assurance processes and software seeks to minimise revenue lost due to incompetence or error, in contrast fraud management is the practice (aided by software solutions) of minimising financial losses due to deliberate or intentional theft (fraud).CSPs are subject to a number of types of fraud, and the types, scale and complexity of fraud continue to increase.

FRAUD
Fraud in telecommunications can be very complex and transversal to the operator structure. The authors propose a classification method used in the FMS case management that allows a better characterization of the fraud phenomenon and enables a detailed reporting. The approach used is based in the 3M’s classification:

Motive: the fundamental objective of the fraud.
1. Non-revenue fraud, making use of a service with intent to avoid the cost but without the intention of making money. It includes providing no-cost services to friends or private usage.
2. Revenue fraud, which intends financial benefits as in Call Selling or Premium Rate Service (PRS) fraud (described below).

Means: the nature or form of the fraud used to satisfy the motive. Some examples:
1. Call Selling: sale of high tariff calls – usually international – bellow their market value with the intent to evade the operator payment.
2. Premium Rate Services (PRS) Fraud: inflation of the revenue payable to a Service Provider by generating calls to a PRS line.
3. Surfing: use of other person’s service without consent which can be achieved, for example, through SIM card duplication (cloning), illegally obtaining calling card authorisation details or PBX hacking.

4. Ghosting: refers to obtaining free or cheap rate through technical means of deceiving the network. It can be performed, for example, by manipulating switch or database contents to ‘alter’ call records.
5. Sensitive information disclosure - involves obtaining valuable information (e.g. VIP client details or access codes) and selling it to external entities. This fraud is usually performed internally.
6. Content stealing: a more recent type of fraud, which deals with getting high value contents (videos, ring tones, games) for free, by exploiting the non real-time pre-paid billing pre-paid system (hot-billing) or by avoiding payment of the invoice (post-paid services).

Method: the generic fraud method.
1. Subscription: fraudulent subscription obtained with false credentials that allow debt accumulation by systematic payment avoidance.
2. Technical: more advanced fraud that is based in exploiting loopholes found in the operator network elements or platforms.
3. Internal: inside information systems abuse

4. Point of Sale: when the dealer manipulates sales figures to increase the compensations paid by the operator

A FMS should be able to collect data from multiple formats and sources, and through a process of data preparation and mediation, conveniently process and adapt it to the system internal data formats. Some of the relevant processes of this stage are data filtering, call assembly and call rating. With some FMS tools, it is possible to perform data enhancement through cross-relation of different data sources, which may boost performance in some more complex detection techniques.

Subsequently, detection processes are applied in order to generate alerts on situations that deserve closer investigation by fraud analysts. Some of the relevant techniques used in this stage are rule–based detection and profiling through Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques like neural networks or decision trees.

Fraud analysts investigate alerts by accessing all relevant information (detailed client/account information, associated Call Detail Records, alert details, client alert history…) needed to conveniently assess the alert. Alert clarification may also benefit from graphic information describing client consumption profile.

Detected fraud cases are then forward to a case manager to initiate subjacent bureaucratic processes subsequent to fraud identification. All relevant information (e.g., CDR details, detailed client information, related alerts…) is attached to the case and the specific case fraud is classified (involved

services and fraud motives, means and methods) along with financial indicators quantifying performed fraud detection gains against fraud losses.

Finally, the system must provide friendly and complete reporting tools, thus allowing access to all relevant information to analyst, fraud process manager and system management information.

Fraud tackling efficiency may also benefit from seamlessly integrating and cross-referencing multiple data sources (client and billing information), which may enable focusing on most suspicious alerts.

Versatility and adaptability of fraudsters imply usage of different tools and technologies for each scenario. These tools must handle huge data volumes (e.g., billions of call records) and allow the integration of any new relevant technology. Additionally, the regular advent and new services and client growth implies easily scalable tools.

Billing, Charging & Settlement

Originally, telecoms billing was post-paid. In other words, a bill (originally this was generally a paper bill) was generated in arrears periodically stating what was owed to the CSP by the customer. The customer was then expected to settle the bill (payment). The bill would typically show a number of different charges, including "line rental" (a fixed charge to cover the cost of maintaining the line and the network) and "call charges" (a variable charge for calls made).

Telecoms bills were calculated according to a number of parameters. For example, the charge for a call would vary depending on factors such as the time of day, the distance and the duration of the call. Initially, consumer bills were typically summary documents, but later so-called "itemised billing" was introduced, which involves listing the charges for individual calls.

With the advent of mobile/wireless telecoms, a new type of telecoms service - prepaid - was introduced. This involved the customer paying a sum in advance, which was depreciated as telecoms services were consumed. The introduction of prepaid services necessitated a change in technology: the solution that supported "prepaid billing" needed to operate in realtime or near-realtime to ensure that customers could not use more services (and therefore incur more charges) than their balance permitted. Prepaid billing became known as "realtime charging" or "online charging" (to contrast with so-called "offline" billing systems that run in batch).

Realtime charging was typcially implemented using a completely separate infrastructure to the billing systems used to support postpaid or contractual customers.

Although post-paid and prepaid billing and charging were typically implemented separately, lately it has become necessary or desirable to offer more flexible and hybrid billing models. This has resulted in so-called convergent charging, which refers to solutions that can support different subscriber types, different networks and different billing models using a single convergent billing system. Increasingly, convergent charging suppliers emphasise the desirability of basing such as solution on a single data model.

Settlement is the term used to refer to the processes and systems that enable CSPs to pay, and receive payment from, partners and suppliers. This includes Interconnect settlement, as well as settlement with content providers, roaming partners and so on. Settlement solutions also often include billing capabilities, as well as Partner relationship management (PRM) functions, Business intelligence (BI) and so on.

Revenue Management

Revenue management is a Business support systems (BSS) process, and refers to those processes in a communications service provider (CSP) that are concerned with collecting, making and assuring payments for services supplied or received. There are two main processes: collection of payments from customers (consumers and businesses) and collection of payments from partners.

Revenue management encompasses technologies and processes such as: Billing, Charging and Settlement; Revenue assurance and Fraud management; Mediation; Rating; Payment.

In addition to vendors of Commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS), revenue management processes are also supported by custom-built systems (built in-house or by third parties), providers of Managed services and other types of outsourced services and solutions (such as Software as a service).

A specialist form of outsourced services in this area is provided by Clearing houses, which support roaming and interconnect partnerships, as well as data exchange and financial settlement between partners.

BSS OSS Revisited

Business support systems (BSS) is a collective term for the telecoms software solutions used to support customers. The term encompasses software that supports billing & charging; customer management; product design & management; sales & marketing; order & order activation.

BSS contrasts with the related term Operational support systems (OSS), which are network-facing solutions.

In reality the two sets of solutions are closely related and increasingly need to work together, thus the terms BSS/OSS, OSS/BSS, BSSOSS and BOSS are often used. Although there is broad agreement over what BSS encompasses, some types of software sit between the BSS and OSS, and the emphasis on "flow through" processes means the separation of systems into BSS and OSS layers is becoming somewhat artificial. Historically, however, this separation was because two separate departments handled these processes - BSS being handled by IT and OSS by networks. Likewise two sets of vendors supported the layers. As time has gone on many vendors have broadened their portfolios to encompass both BSS and OSS.

BSS support four key processes:

• Revenue management - which encompasses Billing, Charging and Settlement, Mediation, Rating, Revenue assurance and Fraud management, Payments.

• Customer management - encompasses Customer relationship management (CRM) - also known as customer care - Customer experience management, Call centre technology, and Partner relationship management (PRM)

• Product management - is concerned with the development, sales and management of products, offers and bundles to businesses and mass-market customers. It includes Service creation, Service Development Platforms (SDPs), Product catalogs and Marketing solutions.

• Order management - involves taking and handling the customer order. This is now often included as part of the customer management solution and involves a close integration with OSS solutions.

Each of these processes is inter-related, and also increasingly closely aligned to allied OSS processes. Although a process may be technically distinct, it is often from an operational or business perspective embedded in another process or closely aligned to it. Thus order management, for example, is an integral part of customer management, the business driver for the OSS process of Service fulfillment, and closely aligned to Revenue management (since it is imperative to ensure that an ordered service is billed for).

OSS - Operational Support Systems

Operations Support Systems (also called Operational Support Systems or OSS) are computer systems used by telecommunications service providers. The term OSS most frequently describes "network systems" dealing with the telecom network itself, supporting processes such as maintaining network inventory, provisioning services, configuring network components, and managing faults.

Operations Support System (OSS) performs management, inventory, engineering, planning, and repair functions for tele-communications service providers and their networks. For traditional telecom service providers, Operations Support Systems (OSSs) were mainframe-based systems designed to support telephone company staff members to automate their daily jobs such as order processing, line assignment, line testing and billing, etc.

Functions of an OSS solution may include the following components:

1: Order processing, accounting, billing and cost management
2: Network inventory, service provision, design and assign
3: Network discovery and reconciliation, trouble and fault management, capacity management
4: Network elements, asset and equipment management, field service management

A brief History of OSS Architecture:

A lot of the work on OSS has been centred on defining its architecture. Put simply, there are four key elements of OSS:
Processes : the sequence of events
Data : the information that is acted upon
Applications: the components that implement processes to manage data
Technology : how we implement the applications

During the 1990's, a 4-layer model of TMN was applicable within an OSS:

1: Business Management Level (BML)
2: Service Management Level (SML)
3: Network Management Level (NML)
4: Element Management Level (EML)

A fifth level is mentioned at times being the elements themselves, though the standards speak of only four levels.

To conclude, the OSS supports the traditional Resource and Resource Facing Service domains, whereas the BSS supports the more Customer Facing domains.

BSS - Business Support Systems

Business Support Systems (BSS) are the systems that a telephone operator or telco uses to run its business operations. The term BSS is no longer limited to telephone operators offering mobile to fixed and cable services but also can apply to service providers in all sectors such as utility providers.

Typical types of activities that count as part of BSS are taking a customer’s order, managing customer data, billing, rating, and offering B2B and B2C services. In summary, Business Support Systems (BSS) cover 4 main areas:

Product Management: Product management supports the sales and management of products, offers and bundles to businesses and mass-market customers. Product Management regularly includes offering cross-product discounts, appropriate pricing and customer loyalty programs.

Customer Management: Service Providers require a single view of the customer and regularly need to support complex hierarchies across customer-facing applications. Customer Management also covers requirements for partner management and 24x7 Web-based customer self-service.

Revenue Management: Revenue Management is a BSS focus on billing, charging and settlement that can handle any combination of OSS services, products and offers. BSS Revenue Management supports OSS order provisioning and often partner settlement.

Fulfillment Management: Fulfillment Management as part of assurance is normally associated with Operational Support Systems though Business Support Systems are often the business driver for Fulfillment Management and order provisioning.

eTOM - Business Process Framework for Telecom

I’ve been craving to write for long on Telecom as I understand it from my experience in the domain over the past (close to) 1 year.

The Telecom Business has two aspects to it:
1: Services – Connecting people and providing High Quality common services to ALL Members of the society at a low cost.
2: Equipment – The Network Elements eg: switches, wires, handsets etc

There has always been a guiding principle to run any Business. That guiding principle is a Business Model / a Framework so here I reproduce information about eTOM that I have come across.

The eTOM:

The NGOSS (Next Generation Operations Systems and Software) Business Process Framework is represented by the Enhanced Telecom Operations Map, also known as (eTOM). The eTOM Business Process Framework is the ongoing TM Forum initiative to deliver a business process model or framework for use by service providers and others within the telecommunications and related sectors of industry.

The eTOM Business Process Framework represents the whole of a service provider’s enterprise environment. The Business Process Framework begins at the Enterprise level and defines business processes in a series of groupings. The Framework is defined as generically as possible so that it is organization, technology and service independent and supports the global community. At the overall conceptual level eTOM can be viewed as having the following three major process areas:
1: Strategy, Infrastructure & Product covering planning and lifecycle management
2: Operations covering the core of operational management
3: Enterprise Management covering corporate or business support management

The process structure in eTOM uses hierarchical decomposition, so that the business processes of the enterprise are successively decomposed in a series of levels. Process descriptions, inputs and outputs, as well as other key elements are defined. The eTOM process modeling depicts process flows in a vertical swim lane approach that drives end-to-end process and process flow-through between the customer and the supporting services, resources and supplier/partners.
The Framework also includes views of functionality as they span horizontally across an enterprise’s internal organizations. For example, managing customer relationships spans an enterprise from marketing to ordering to billing to after-service support and follow-on sales.
In particular, eTOM provides the Business Map for NGOSS and is a prime driver for business requirements to feed through from the NGOS Business View to the System View and eventually intothe NGOSS Implementation and Deployment Views. The focus of eTOM is on the business processes used by service providers, the linkages between these processes, the identification of interfaces, and the use of customer, service, resource, supplier/partner and other information by multiple processes.
The eTOM Business Process Framework can be used as a tool for analyzing your organization’s existing processes and for developing new processes. Different processes delivering the same business functionality can be identified, duplication eliminated, gaps revealed, new process design speeded up, and variance reduced. Using eTOM, you can assess the value, cost and performance of individual processes within your organization.
You can facilitate your relationships with suppliers and partners by identifying and categorizing the processes you use in interactions with them. In a similar manner, you can identify the all-important customer relationship processes and evaluate whether they are functioning as required to meet your customers’ expectations.