Holding on to your prepaid customers

Once upon a time a prepaid customer was either a postpaid who hadn’t yet been up-sold, or someone who, for various reasons, wasn’t worthy of being up-sold at all. But no more. The days of the prepaid customer being tended with rudimentary CRM are over. In developed markets winning and keeping prepaid clients by offering improved service bundles drives a parallel requirement to capture additional information on prepaid customers and to work on ways to communicate with them - in other words to manage and engage with at least the same level of enthusiasm shown to postpaids.

Emerging markets are fast developing the same shape, so those operators who can act first by deploying the necessary infrastructure to tend and support their prepaid customers will reap big competitive rewards. We explain how.

And to that end, Mediator Plus, Cerillion’s new convergent online and offline mediation system, could be part of the infrastructure solution for both postpaid and prepaid service challenges.

It is designed to support the sophisticated charging requirements of operators as they roll-out real-time next generation communications services to their entire customer base and it is being delivered as part of Cerillion’s Total Convergence Architecture (TCA) – a flexible model that helps telecom operators to address the critical challenges of converging their prepaid and postpaid platforms.

We’ll be exhibiting Mediator Plus along with the rest of our pre-integrated BSS/OSS solutions - including Revenue Manager, CRM Plus, Service Manager, and Interconnect Manager - at Management World in Nice next month, so please come by and let us exercise a little CRM of our own at Booth #85.

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CRM – Bringing prepaid customers in from the cold

Most telecoms operators are used to engaging with their postpaid customers using sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and highly-efficient CRM processes. Operators typically draw on classic call centre techniques such as knowledge of customer history and key demographics, for example, to inform the overall approach to service delivery and drive up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

By contrast, prepaid (or “pay as you go”) customers have traditionally been serviced using only basic administration systems and rudimentary self-care supplemented by text messages and handset alerts.

Today, this situation is changing. In advanced markets it has been a focus for operators for some time. Many have already made significant progress in upgrading their prepaid CRM capability. In emerging regions, however, it is now becoming an area of critical concern and telecoms providers who can quickly address the CRM challenges can take the lead over their competitors in this area.

Keeping the customer happy

Operators have always been painfully aware that because their prepaid customers are not contracted, it is easy for them to switch to a competitive offering. For this reason, they are increasingly recognising the need to develop closer relationships with prepaid customers and raise their loyalty levels. After all, while postpaid customers are typically contacted once a month through the medium of a printed or electronic bill, the way prepaid accounts are structured means that there are few natural opportunities for dialogue between operator and prepaid user.

The key then for operators is to encourage and promote more effective engagement with their prepaid customers and then ensure that they have the tools in place to manage this communication more effectively.

Providing an incentive

Operators in the past have typically delivered two different levels of service to prepaid customers. The most basic has been provided to customers that wish to remain anonymous. In certain parts of the world, where regulation still permits prepaid anonymity, this group represents a significant proportion of all prepaid users. However, operators in the more advanced markets have been providing incentives to those prepaid customers that are prepared to give more information about themselves in exchange for a reward.

They might, for example, give each customer an extra bundle of text messages or throw in additional services free-of-charge, if in return those users supply their name, address and information about their interests. After all, if operators are serious about offering more effective customer relationship management (CRM), it is critical that they capture this kind of basic information as the foundation for developing and enhancing the customer experience.

Putting it in context

Operators regularly use techniques like data mining and data warehousing to analyse usage patterns and build customer intelligence. Yet, in order to deliver a better level of service they need to understand much more about who their customers are, what they do, to whom they are related – both in a family and a business context – and critically whether they are likely to be influential in the way other people use the service. This is more important than ever in the new era of online social networking.

For these reasons, they need to pinpoint each user’s precise role. Are they the head of the household, for example? Do they have a prepaid service for home but also a key senior management role within the workplace? These factors will, and indeed should, have an influence on the approach that the operator takes in providing CRM.

And those operators with the most comprehensive CRM systems will be best placed to understand and capture all the relevant information relating to the role of each of these individuals in the different ‘communities’ in which they operate.

Keeping in touch

As we noted earlier, the other challenge that operators face in dealing with prepaid users is establishing regular lines of communication. In the prepaid world, users have historically been steered either into online self-service situations or doing everything via their handset.

In fact prepaid users, like their postpaid peers, still like to be able to talk to individuals when they have a problem. So having a CRM layer that covers both sets of users, and critically empowering the customer service representative (CSR) to capture more information about the particular customer through a one-to-one telephone conversation, can be a major benefit.

Ultimately, the operator in this context has two key objectives both of which can be achieved more effectively if there is a proper CRM capability in place. The first is the need to build up the loyalty and ‘stickiness’ of prepaid customers. If the operator is able to focus on looking after these subscribers as individual people rather than as telephone numbers, then they are likely to stay loyal for longer.

To further boost retention levels, operators also need to ensure that prepaid customers are managed in real-time. Prepaid users are aware that their balance will be instantly changed as soon as a transaction is made and if they run out of credit, the service is suspended. So, if a customer does have a problem and contacts the call centre, it is critical that the CSRs there have a real-time view of the customer information in order to be able to take immediate action to resolve it. This level of visibility is only possible if the CRM application is closely integrated with the back-office tariff and charging systems.

Of course, retaining customers is not sufficient by itself. Operators also want to drive increased service usage and higher average revenue per user (ARPU). This is where the CRM layer really comes into its own as a means of cross-selling and up-selling additional products and services. A good CRM system will be able to tell the operator what additional services could be offered and what might be compatible with their existing portfolio, driving inbound and outbound campaigns.

The operator might also want to encourage prepaid users to migrate into the postpaid world. By offering these users incentives such as lower tariffs, increased service bundles and subsidised handsets, it might hope to tie them into long-term contracts which provide a more predictable and secure revenue stream. And by using a single CRM solution to manage both prepaid and postpaid users, operators can make it easier for themselves to incentivise customers using hybrid services to start the migration to longer-term contracts.

In the UK, in particular, operators have begun to offer extremely competitive deals on SIM-only contracts in a bid to bridge the middle ground between the traditional postpaid contracts with subsidised phones, and prepaid services with higher tariffs and full-price handsets. The operators’ ultimate objective is to tempt prepaid users to take out long-term contracts without themselves having to carry the burden of subsidised handsets.

A new focus

In the current economic climate, CRM projects must be extremely focused and deliver real benefit to the business in a timely fashion. In this situation operators will achieve significant benefits by implementing telecoms-specific CRM applications. They will not have to derive all of the processes from scratch, or configure a new business logic for the telecoms sector. And they will have the benefit of knowing that their users will have access to a range of telecoms-specific services, such as the ability to add and provision new telecoms services immediately from the CRM platform.

Clearly, we are witnessing a sea-change in the way telecoms operators view and manage their prepaid customers. The high levels of churn among these users means operators must increasingly focus on engaging more closely with this segment of their customer base, gathering relevant information about them and using that to enhance the service offering they provide.

No longer the poor relations of the telecoms world, prepaid users are increasingly being brought into the fold and look set to soon achieve equal status with their postpaid peers. The use of specialised telecoms CRM systems to upgrade prepaid users from the simplistic customer management they typically encounter today is the key to providing them with a much more comprehensive and sophisticated customer experience.

Dominic Smith
Dominic.Smith@cerillion.com

Visit Cerillion at Management World 2009

Taking place from 4th – 8th May at the Acropolis Convention Center in Nice, Management World 2009 is TM Forum’s global event bringing together over 3,500 executives from the information, communications and entertainment industries. The annual event will focus on creating and delivering profitable services across the value chain; driving up new revenues, increasing customer care, retaining business and driving down operating costs.

Book an Appointment

Visit Cerillion at Booth #85 to find out how our unique bundled component product suite can help your business to flourish.

On our stand we’ll be exhibiting the latest generation of our innovative pre-integrated BSS/OSS solutions, including Revenue Manager, CRM Plus, Service Manager, Mediator Plus and Interconnect Manager. Feel free to pop by our booth at your convenience or click here to pre-book an appointment for an in-depth demonstration.

Cerillion Unveils New Convergent Mediation Solution – Mediator Plus

London, 11th February 2009 – Billing specialist, Cerillion Technologies has announced the launch of Mediator Plus, a new convergent online and offline mediation system. The solution is designed to support the sophisticated charging requirements of operators as they rollout real-time next generation communications services to their entire customer base.

Mediator Plus is the first new product delivered as part of Cerillion’s Total Convergence Architecture (TCA) – a flexible model that helps telecom operators to address the critical challenges of converging their prepaid and postpaid platforms.

Mediator Plus enables operators to tap into new revenue generation opportunities. It solves complex data integration challenges in one single platform, supporting any combination of online and offline processing. It is also designed to minimise implementation efforts in a user-friendly manner, providing an unprecedented speed of deployment and ease of operation.

Operator-specific mediation processes and policies can be modelled, configured, deployed and maintained through Mediator Plus’ intuitive graphical user interface. The system also uses a core set of functional components to provide comprehensive rules-based processing capabilities. A powerful just-in-time compiled scripting language allows the user to specify the behaviour of these components and what type of processing is to be performed.

In addition, Mediator Plus supports all the main charging interface protocols including Diameter and is built for carrier-grade operation, supporting real-time N+1 high-availability configurations.

“Many technology vendors today offer separate online and offline mediation systems. Aligned within our flexible TCA framework, Mediator Plus enables operators to conduct all of the same processes on a single convergent platform,” says Louis Hall, Cerillion’s chief executive. “We believe the enhanced efficiency that Mediator Plus delivers will be a source of competitive advantage for operators as they gear up to offer a new generation of real-time services.”

Cerillion Launches New Website

The Cerillion website www.cerillion.com has recently gone through a major redevelopment and was re-launched at the beginning of March. The new site includes many changes and enhancements to improve the user journey through the site, including:

• newly refreshed look and feel
• secure area for downloading brochures and white papers
• direct addressing (deep links) to any page in the site
• “breadcrumb” based site navigation
• context-sensitive “related links”
• improved search engine
• support for all major browsers

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We hope you like our new website? Tell us what you think of it by emailing marketing@cerillion.com.