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V. Rishi Kumar

The telephone user wants a variety of services, but one bill. He also wants the freedom to choose his mode of payment. CSG says it can help companies please their customers.

GIMME more! For less! That, in four words, is what today's telecom customer wants. He wants to help himself to a bouquet of services, and operators, but wants, as customers typically will, one consolidated bill, and his own choice of payment.

And in an era where the customer is king as never before, telecom operators are bending over backwards to nourish customer needs and keep the telecom pie growing.

For instance, operators in Latin America have introduced prepaid fleet phones where business customers have the option of having a single account with multiple services, both prepaid and postpaid, or linked accounts, each with their own services and payment mechanisms.

With this kind of a flexible package, a business customer can maintain a fleet of phones for its employees with a predictable monthly payment. The customer also has the option of topping up the fleet of phones to a specific amount, each month.

Indian operators too are set to push the frontiers of services innovation. They want to clearly differentiate their offerings. They want to provide greater customer value and increase customer retention and loyalty.

Especially, as prepaid subscriber penetration flattens in India, operators will need to find ways to encourage customers to convert to contracted, or postpaid, subscribers. In doing so, ARPU (average return per user) and loyalty increase.

Raghav Sehgal, Vice-President and head of CSG Systems, Asia-Pacific, shares with eWorld his take on the fast growing telecom market. Excerpts from the chat.

The Asia-Pacific region, particularly India and China, seem to be two of the fastest growing markets. Could you identify some key trends here?

Some key trends here are: massive scale of growth, especially in the prepaid sector; increasing adoption of electronic lifestyle; continuous efforts to reduce operational cost; and increasing opportunities in mobile content. All this demands world-class service and billing solutions. The operators' value chain has also expanded. It now includes opportunities to represent third-party content and services via the operators' network.

India and China are truly the fastest growing markets, in the Asia-Pacific region, and globally too. The Indian market is poised for steep growth, especially in the prepaid mobile segment where real-time billing will become critical for success. It is also introducing smarter phones, so data, content and enhanced services will soon require a well-formulated billing strategy.

Indian operators want billing and customer care systems that have the ability to handle an enormous range of tasks — from providing customer care support, to billing the customer, to generating new revenues, while still preserving the freedom to add other integrated or third-party applications that fit their business requirements as it evolves.

In other words, it's all about convergent billing, real-time prepaid billing, prepaid data and content billing, and billing of broadband and enhanced services.

Wireless applications seem to be growing pretty fast. Do you see the sector sustaining this trend?

We see continued momentum in the wireless market. According to IDC,there are 44 cellular services providers in the region (excluding Japan) generating about $70 billion in 2004. The market is projected to grow by 16 per cent in 2005, with the bulk of growth coming from India.

If it was customer acquisition some time ago, the focus now is on retention, right?

As the market matures, with increasing competition, and hence increasing choice, the customer truly becomes the king. In such a market, typically new subscriber addition comes at a lower ARPU. Hence, the concept of customer retention or loyalty becomes extremely critical.

The customer wants to receive a consolidated bill at the end of the month and have freedom in deciding the best mode of payment.

To manage this joint relationship, operators must gather and make available information across a company, through CRM (customer relationship management), billing, orders, and a wide range of other customer-impacting applications. Giving direct access to disparate and specialised data sources and applications is often costly and risky.

How can operators develop a consolidated profile of a customer that provides a single view?

The answer exists within new business process and technology that create context and meaning from a customer identity spread across many systems. The customer profile is not the customer record in a CRM database. Rather, the profile is the common point of understanding of a customer's multi-faceted relationship with the operator - be it financial (billing), service (orders) and communications (CRM). The customer profile management is the logical layer that consolidates and interprets the disparate system data into customer accessible information. Considering the many sources and their ways to describe a customer, a consolidated profile provides a single view of the customer, a clearly beneficial prospect for the company.

What are CSG's plans for India?

CSG Systems has been strengthening its presence in India over the last three years as a customer care and billing solutions company.

It operates in India through its 100 per cent subsidiary, CSG India Ltd. CSG brings to India KenanFX, a technology architecture designed to support services across all communications business in the convergence era.

Operators face an opportune moment to maximise profitability by aggressively targeting prepaid segment for data services as well as subscribers for convergent services.

The Indian telecom market is one of the few markets in the world today that is still seeing great organic growth, particularly exponential growth in mobile subscriber base, broadband sector as well as some growth in the fixed line market.

The second important market driver would come in terms of new services that would be required to be launched to provide better value add to existing customers and new-customer acquisition. New services like content services, broadband services, new methods of payments — electronic bill presentation and payment — will contribute greatly to the growth of the market.

What are your plans for the R&D centre in Hyderabad?

CSG's R&D facility in Hyderabad supports local development but these R&D personnel are directly involved in our core development.

This blends international technological knowledge and local market understanding to support Indian operators' on-going business development and innovations.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in

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