OCS introduces following new concepts.
- Products and Appendant products ( simply speaking, a subscriber can have a main package and then sub packages in layers.)
- Global Products (Packages that are applicable to complete subscriber base)
- Accumulators (These are counters which will record subscriber activity and are used to offer loyalty or usage based promotions to subscribers)
- Subscriber attributes ( Attributes like subscriber’s birthday, gender, profession , last activity date, last recharge date .etc. can be used as a criteria for promotions and tariff)
- Due to planned aggressive micro segmentation strategy, each subscriber can have a unique product set based on above four criteria.
Above mentioned new OCS concepts, raises many questions from business point of view. Some of these are…
- How will revenue be reported? Impact on MIS and Reporting Functions!
- How will revenue be assured? Impact on Revenue assurance system!
- How will customer data be managed on CRM? Impact on CRM system!
- How will contact center agent handle the customer complaints? Impact on CRM system!
- How will such a wide array of products be promoted? Impact on CRM system!
- How will sanity of numerous OCS based promotions will be verified. Impact on Revenue assurance, MIS, CRM, Fraud Management systems
- How will subscriber be entering his personal information in OCS? Impact on CRM
- What will happen if subscriber changes his MSISDN, will we refresh his accumulators or will these accumulators be transferred to his new account à Impact on CARES
All these questions and many more demand a complete re-think and review of business process framework to meet the challenges of OCS in BSS domain. It is imperative to evolve IT systems and OCS in tandem to maximize and harness OCS benefits.
These issues must be discussed at length with IT and marketing teams, the best way forward in my humble opinion is to gather requirements in the form of new business rules in following domains
- Revenue assurance
- Customer Data Management
- Fraud management
- Complaints management
IT team should be requested to take the lead in this specialized domain and compile new set of business rules (if required) from end users such as Finance, Cops and marketing. These business rules will be translated into technical requirements which can impact OCS CDR/ DB logs formats and CRM interfaces.
