The growth of mobile and the increasing requirements for high-speed data has caused periods of hyper growth in some emerging markets. Service providers in these markets, including Latin America, Mexico, Africa, Eastern Europe, India and China, are seeing an increasing strain on their back-office infrastructure for ordering and provisioning new services. Many of these providers are still relying on homegrown systems developed when they had far fewer services and customers. For most, it’s time for a replacement.
We recently completed an installation for a provider in one of these high-growth markets that was struggling with significant issues. Based on the issues the provider faced, we identified four signs that it’s time to replace your homegrown OSS/BSS system:
- You can’t keep up with the volume of new orders: If your ordering process is outdated, your whole business suffers because you aren’t provisioning new customers quickly and easily. A catalog-driven model can not only help you make upgrades or service changes easy for existing customers, it can also help you get new customers online quickly and respond to competitive threats.
- You want to roll out new products: Your customers are ready for new products and the network is there to support them. However, rolling out new products can be painful if you’re working from a homegrown product catalog. Product catalogs contain rules that determine the types of products providers can sell, to whom they can sell, for how much and under what terms. It’s a key factor in determining how quickly CSPs can define new products and respond to new offerings from competitors.
- Your truck rolls are high: If you need a truck roll for provisioning even basic services, a catalog-driven system can help put you on the right track. Many issues are caused not by an issue at the customer end but rather one that could have been prevented during the ordering process. When a catalog-driven system was embraced by this provider, truck rolls were reduced by 50 percent and incoming calls to the call center by 60%.
- Your order fallout is high: There is nothing worse than an unhappy customer, especially one whose order needs to be changed because the service they bought can’t be delivered for a variety of reasons. Using a product catalog-driven approach, order fallout is reduced and customer satisfaction is improved.
After installing a new system to replace their homegrown one, the customer realized complete ROI on the project in less than six months. Even better, they reduced truck rolls, reduced order fallout, improved customer satisfaction and time to market. All in all, an investment worth making.
See for yourself how Hansen can help you to Create, Deliver and Engage with new products.
