The Ultimate Guide To Convergent Billing Systems For Next-gen Telecom Growth

By Author: Kevin
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It is truly said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

The future depends on how fast and easily telecommunication operators can monetize their services from voice and data to OTT content, IoT, and beyond. The leading solution to this innovation is convergent billing.

Gone are the days of disconnected billing stacks and delayed settlements. In this modern era, where customer expectations are driven by the pace of technological advancements, billing can no longer be an afterthought. It needs to be a real-time, intelligent engine that drives growth, agility, and experience.

What is convergent billing?

Convergent billing allows telecom operators to manage billing of services through different sectors of telecommunication, such as prepaid, postpaid, broadband, digital subscriptions, and the like, on a singular platform. A convergent billing system will provide a standard 360-degree view of a customer’s usage, charging, and invoicing, unlike a legacy segmented system that will not. This transition is strategically technical. Customers now expect single consolidated bills, ...
... the flexibility to bundle services, and a seamless transition between services. If a telecom service provider is not able to address these needs, it risks falling behind the competition.

The Role of Telecom Billing Platforms

As telecom portfolios grow, so will the complexity to manage, service, and charge for them. This is where telecom billing platforms come to the rescue. The modern telecom billing platform is much more than just a billing platform that produces invoices. It is a real-time rating, policy control, partner settlement, and OSS/BSS integrated platform.

The cloud-native architecture and microservices not only provide scalability but also agility, enabling operators to test, launch, and monetize a new service quickly. The platform must be able to support flexible billing logic without requiring code rewriting to accommodate it whether it is deploying a new 5G slice or onboarding an OTT partnership.

Key Attributes of Futuristic Telecom Billing Platforms

The futuristic convergent billing platforms combine multiple advanced capabilities into a single platform. Let us have a look at key capabilities among them, as follows.

1. Real-time, multi-product rating and charging:

Innovative telecom billing platforms can handle both prepaid and postpaid services. It rates voice, data, and content usage in real-time. Advanced rating engines can apply considerable pricing discounts and settle with partners’ revenues.

2. Flexible Pricing and Bundling:

The ability to support tiered pricing plans, bundles, add-ons, and pay-per-use offers allows operators to quickly develop and deliver innovative offers. For instance, digital BSS solutions can provide unlimited “freemium” data tiers or usage-based video packages without manual intervention.

3. Unified Customer and Revenue View:

A single customer record combines all services and billing-related information to provide a complete 360-degree view of customer usage and changes together. In addition, the consolidated ledger enables greater accuracy and more robust analytics, providing more opportunities for upselling.

4. Cloud-native scalability:

Utilizing microservices and containerized architecture, cloud-native systems scale elastically to millions of users. Distributed processing and utilizing in-memory caching that maintains high performance and availability, even under peak loads, and simplified upgrades.

Key Benefits of Convergent Billing and Digital BSS

Adopting a unified convergent billing system yields strategic advantages such as:

Operational Efficiency:

An automated billing system reduces the need for manual data entry and other errors. In fact, the industry experts indicate that automated rating and invoicing are more “accurate and efficient”. This makes billing cycles even more effective.

Cost Reduction:

By consolidating multiple billing engines into one, customers can save on administrative overheads and lower IT maintenance costs.

Data-driven Insights:

A fully integrated digital BSS solution brings together full usage and revenue data. Analytics tools reveal insights into customer behavior and usage trends, helping operators shape their pricing and offers.

Faster Time-to-market:

Cloud-native convergent platforms increase agility and reduce the time to launch a product. They streamline the provisioning of services and launch new offers to keep the telecom operators ahead of the competition.

Migration Strategies with Implementation Tips

Moving to a convergent billing system is a complicated, multi-part project. There are various challenges that organizations must address, including integrated systems, ensuring company data consistency, and organizing for a change in mindset. Below are some professional recommendations.

Plan for the complexity of integration:

Most telecom networks are built on a legacy OSS/BSS and have multiple siloed subsystems and applications. A phased approach to convergent billing systems is recommended, focusing on each domain at a time. It enables you to integrate various systems in a logical sequence, using open APIs and microservices methods wherever possible to integrate with the CRM, provisioning, and billing systems. You should focus on the core services and add additional services that were previously done as a batch, once there is enough confidence, with little or no risk, in their implementation.

Align Your Pricing Models and Processes:

Ensure that the convergent billing system has full support for your product catalog and total pricing models. Bundles, tiered subscriptions, promotions, and revenue-sharing partners. Implement an environment that incentivizes collaboration among marketing, product, and IT teams, allowing for the quick design and testing of new offers. Use analytics to adapt your plans, educating your prospects and customers on their usage.

Look to the future regarding scale and performance:

The convergent billing system must accommodate high transaction volumes, as well as support real-time applications. Use the latest generation cloud-native, distributed, federated, and/or containerized architecture to process usage feeds and generate invoices on the fly. Utilize monitoring and caching to identify and mitigate bottlenecks, allowing for the detection of issues before they impact customers.

Ensure Security and Compliance:

All convergent billing systems deal with sensitive personal and financial data. Implement strong encryption, strict access controls, and data masking for customer records to ensure data security and confidentiality. Compliance with legislation such as GDPR or CCPA should be built into the system, not added as an afterthought.

Manage Organizational Change:

Successful migration is beyond technology. You need a complete change management plan that has executive sponsorship, communicates your goals and dates to all stakeholders, and establishes cross-functional governance forums. As one expert wrote, build a governance and knowledge-sharing structure that keeps IT aligned with business priorities, it inspires to invest in training and upskilling.

Future Trends in Convergent Billing and Digital BSS

AI and Predictive Analytics:

Next-generation digital BSS solutions utilize machine learning to transform data into actionable insights. These AI-enabled systems can also analyze a huge usage database to anticipate customer needs and behaviours. For example, an AI-enabled billing system can detect patterns of service usage and proactively present relevant packages and promotions long before the customer even knows their needs. An insight-driven platform allows operators to manage pricing and service plans in real-time, increasing retention and revenue.

Dynamic Policy Control:

Intelligent policy engines allow operators to change service parameters and pricing on demand. For example, a policy-driven billing engine could upsell a customer to a high-speed network slice during peak hours for an additional fee. Leading BSS will typically promote features like “dynamic policy control and charging to optimize network performance and revenue, as well as charging based on quality of service to capture B2BX models.

5G Slices and New Service Models:

The advent of 5G has introduced new monetization models. Operations can now market private networks and network slices as standalone services that come with specific SLAs and billing plans. Network slicing is anticipated to be a leading driver for 5G standalone revenue in the near term, as well as the underpinning B2BX ecosystems, in reality, how billing systems support the dynamic, language-based charging of each slice of session is paramount in fact, heavy reading believes that slicing and edge computing will expand the range of use cases and revenue models. However, systems will incorporate these capabilities, an enabling factor for multi-party settlements and adaptable pricing for tomorrow’s services.

Key Takeaways

- Convergent billing is central to capitalizing on new revenues and enhancing operational efficiencies. The leading operators use convergent billing systems to provide unique, seamless, multi-play service bundles while decreasing operational complexity.

- Next-generation telecom billing platform offerings are based on cloud-native, API-based and AI-enabled solutions. Predictive analytics and dynamic pricing methodologies allow organizations the ability to maximize value by anticipating customer needs.

- The best practices of migration include phased integration planning, ensuring data standards are adhered to and tying IT to a business strategy, clearly defining communication strategies, and training programs to allow teams to adjust to the new systems.
- Looking ahead, AI-powered analytics, dynamic policy controls, and flexible charging for new 5G services will drive central billing systems. Companies that modernize billing and digital BSS around converged solutions are positioning themselves to capture opportunities to monetize converged offerings.

- The vision of converging billing for services and different business models can allow leadership and telecommunication to sanitize operational efficiency, innovate at great speed, and monetize new service revenues as products are delivered in the 5G communication era.

For more information visit https://www.6dtechnologies.com/products-solutions/digital-bss-solutions