Comverse’s Business Support System (BSS) solution is helping communication service providers (CSPs) manage all customers consistently and interactively across all telecommunications channels. This is important for retaining existing customers, attracting new customers and lowering costs, according to a recently published study by Telesperience.

Telesperience, a UK-based telecom analyst firm, surveyed different types of CSPs across the globe to find out their challenges and objectives concerning customer management. Traditionally, this area has been associated with “customer care” and “customer relationship management”, but it has been increasingly extended to other activities affecting the overall customer experience, such as ordering, billing, payment, sales and marketing.

Overall, the most pressing issue was a lack of customer management consistency across channels, primarily caused by multiple legacy business systems not “talking” with each other to present one view of the customer. According to 75 percent of the CSPs, this created a sub-optimal customer experience, which is driving customer churn.

Comverse addresses these issues with the Comverse ONE Billing & Active Customer Management solution, a comprehensive BSS, built around a single data model and product catalogue that offers a complete, real-time view of customer and product data across an operator’s network. The solution’s unified architecture enables operators to leverage an Active Customer Management approach to manage all customers consistently and in a real-time, interactive manner, regardless of how the customer chooses to pay for services or interacts with the CSP.

“Legacy customer management infrastructure was designed for a different business paradigm and now inhibits CSPs from meeting their customers’ expectations. Ignoring the problem and bolting on additional systems is increasingly becoming not viable,” says Teresa Cottam, research director at Telesperience.

“By moving towards convergent customer management, CSPs improve their ability to deliver optimal and consistent customer management, targeted marketing, competitive differentiation and growth enablement while also minimising their costs,” Cottam said. “As a result, we see a strong trend developing for more and more CSPs to implement convergent customer management systems, such as the Comverse ONE Billing and Active Customer Management solution.”

The full results of the Comverse-commissioned study can be found in the Telesperience report, Enhancing the customer experience using convergent customer management, which is available online.

“The Telesperience study serves to underscore Comverse’s unique approach to helping CSPs deliver an optimal customer experience,” said Gabriel Matsliach, president of global products and operations at Comverse, the world’s leading supplier of software and systems enabling value-added messaging and content services, converged billing and active customer management and IP communications.
About Telesperience
Telesperience is a UK analyst firm that focuses on how global communications service providers can use business & operational support systems (BOSS) and related IT solutions to improve their commercial agility and their customer experience. Telesperience publishes a range of free resources for the CSP community from its website www.telesperience.com, including the monthly Telesperience podzine and industry blog microsperience.com.

About Comverse
Comverse is the world’s leading provider of software and systems enabling value-added services for voice, messaging, mobile internet and mobile advertising, converged billing and active customer management and IP communications. Comverse’s extensive customer base spans more than 125 countries and covers over 450 communication service providers serving more than two billion subscribers. The company’s innovative product portfolio enables communication service providers to unleash the value of the network for their customers by making their networks smarter. Comverse’s solutions support flexible deployment models, including in-network, hosted and managed services, and can run on circuit-switched, IP, IMS or converged network environments. Comverse is a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, Inc. (CMVT.PK). For more information, visit www.comverse.com.

All product and company names mentioned herein may be registered trademarks or trademarks of Comverse or the respective referenced company(s).