Why Redknee’s Pre-Integrated
Real-Time Billing and Customer Care
Solution is the Right Choice for CSPs
>>Summary
In an increasingly saturated and competitive market, telecom operators face huge
challenges where their services are quickly becoming a commodity and their margins are
shrinking. Telcos are pressured to reduce operating costs, differentiate services, enhance
customer experience, and generate new revenue streams from new 4G services. To address
these challenges, telcos require a more holistic, robust, and agile Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) system; that is fully integrated into the operator’s business support
systems (BSS). Redknee’s end-to-end billing, customer care and revenue management
solution allows operators to manage the entire subscriber relationship lifecycle through a
single solution delivered on-premise or over the cloud.
Key Messages
• Redknee’s convergent billing and CRM solution comes with a complete suite of
self-care products that can be delivered on-premise or over the cloud to reduce
risk and time-to-launch.
• Redknee addresses the challenges telcos are facing to improve operational
efficiency and manage customer data across different back office applications. It
offers a converged billing and CRM solution that consolidates customer data and
makes it available to all customer-facing applications.
• Redknee’s innovative converged billing platform facilitates telcos to enhance
customer experience, define and launch new services and promotions quickly, and
reduce time to revenue by fully integrating the order to cash process.
• Redknee has integrated policy controls and business intelligence capabilities
into the core platform that help analyze real-time customer data and provide
personalized services at the same time.
• Redknee has experienced year-over-year revenue growth as a result of innovative
©Copyright Redknee Inc. 2013
products and strong go-to-market initiatives as well as a healthy and growing
pipeline.
>>Why You Should Select Redknee
In recent years, customer experience management has emerged as the top priority for
telcos in which they must have a complete view of customer’s profile. But unfortunately,
today’s telcos don’t have a complete view of their customers because of uncoordinated
front and back-office systems, as well as separate CRM and billing information silos. Redknee
provides next-generation real-time converged billing, customer care and analytics software
for service providers in an on-premise and cloud-based model.
Redknee’s billing and customer care solution bridges this gap with an integrated BSS and
CRM to manage all subscriber data and service revenues through a single unified platform.
The Redknee solution gives telcos greater agility to support new services, devices, and
technologies, and gain a real-time 360 degree view of subscriber activity. The platform
combines data elements from various business applications and displays it in a single view.
The real-time business metrics facilitate telcos to make informed business decisions.
>>Highlights
Background
Redknee commenced operations in 1999, with its headquarters in Canada. Today, Redknee
has grown to serve telcos globally with offices in Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, India,
Japan, Lebanon, Poland, Spain, Taiwan, UK and the US. Its revenues are distributed across
the globe with the largest portion of its revenue coming from the EMEA region. In 2011,
Redknee attributed 43% of its revenues to the EMEA region, 32% to Americas and 25% to
the APAC region. Redknee has healthy and growing relationships with over 200 telcos across
the globe. Redknee’s client list includes AT&T, T-Mobile USA, Telefonica-O2 Group, TSTT,
Vodafone Group, and Zain Group among others.
Redknee offers an array of flexible deployment and commercial models to suit telco business
requirements. These models include a right-to-use model (customer buys software), a termbased model (customer rents software and maintenance services for a specific period) and
a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Redknee has successfully deployed a
multi-tenant architecture to host more than one MVNO in a private cloud with a roadmap
to replicate this model for more clients.
Redknee focuses on its key strengths, i.e. converged billing, and relies on partnerships for
others. In recent years, Redknee has successfully built strong partnerships with leading
IT vendors and system integrators. Redknee has leveraged the Microsoft Dynamics CRM
framework to expand its real-time billing solution and has won multiple transformation
projects in Europe and APAC as a result. In addition, Redknee has go-to-market partnerships
with system integrators, such as Accenture, Tech Mahindra and TCS. These partnerships
have helped Redknee strengthen its technology and services offerings.
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Current position
Linkage between policy controls and real-time analytics has become important for an
end-to-end converged billing solution, a capability that has moved from “nice-to-have” to
“must-have” status. Redknee’s billing and customer care solution is an end-to-end solution
with integrated policy controls and business intelligence (BI). Integrated Policy and Charging
Rules Function (PCRF) capabilities enable flexibility in service personalization, which is
important for telcos to create stickiness with customers. The solution establishes real-time
“policy environments” that facilitate telcos to change service features and delivery options
in real-time and on a case-by-case basis, for example customizing pricing rules. In addition,
BI capabilities sitting on the core engine help telcos analyze dashboards in real-time. Some
of the most popular use cases include analyzing the success of promotions and campaigns.
Strongly integrated PCRF and BI capabilities are key differentiators of Redknee’s converged
billing platform, key strengths that many analysts firms believe will allow Redknee to secure
a strong position in the market.
As telcos move towards convergence of their business units, they demand platforms that can
interact and respond in real-time to subscribers’ needs, regardless of service or technology.
Redknee’s billing and customer care platform facilitates telcos to enable self-care capabilities
through the device and web, providing subscribers real-time access to their account and
sub-account information, and the ability to manage usage, sign up for additional services,
and personalize the experience from a centralized portal. Self-care capabilities carry a huge
potential to reduce overall CRM costs, as subscribers get more customer care online.
Redknee’s commitment to innovation is central to the company’s growth strategy. To date,
Redknee has filed for more than 100 patents of which approximately 35 are granted. In
the next 12-18 months, Redknee plans to focus on integrating additional customer data
points into the cloud based models. It is also investing to improve capabilities across cloud
enablement, NGN convergence to enhance customer experience with a single bill and a
single contact center across business units, and partner enablement to drive services on the
platform. With a robust end-to-end solution, Redknee can secure itself a stronger position
in this emerging marketspace.
What sets Redknee apart from the competition?
Redknee is a true end-to-end real-time converged billing vendor: In service since 2003,
Redknee’s real-time converged billing solution is one of the first to market and has been
designed as a converged billing solution from Day-1. Redknee’s solution has not been pieced
together through acquisitions of post-paid billing by core vendors or prepaid INs by billing
vendors. This means that Redknee does not have integration challenges and can therefore
concentrate its R&D efforts on bringing new functionalities and innovation.
Redknee has the most complete suite of products to enhance the customer experience:
CSPs who want to differentiate in highly competitive markets to prevent churn and increase
revenue will have to empower customers by:
Offering control and choice:
• Flexible “a la carte” bundles and tariffs across services and devices that can
be accessed by any channel.
• Flexible payment options (pre, post-paid and hybrid)
• Multiple self-care channels to select products, manage their accounts and
pay their bills.
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Gaining their confidence:
• Offer price plans that consumers understand (time, spend, application – not
only bandwidth).
• Offer complete visibility with real-time spend controls and notifications.
Offering targeted promotions:
• Quickly launch unique offers for identified market segments (e.g. youth,
business users etc…)
• Use real-time behavioral data to build and execute targeted campaigns
Redknee’s end-to-end converged billing solution circumvents any integration issues that
other vendors, which have mashed prepaid and postpaid billing systems together, face when
integrating real-time control layers with other applications such as policy control, analytics
and real-time promotions. These challenges, therefore, are limiting CSPs ability to have
meaningful interactions with customers in real-time.
Redknee offers a convergent billing solution that is pre-integrated with CRM: Redknee
became one of the first telco solution providers to pre-integrate its real-time converged billing
solution with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This has led to multiple service providers adopting
the pre-integrated solution. Already, customers are realizing the benefits – including at one
customer, where they reported a 95% customer satisfaction rate and has helped to improve
key performance metrics in its customer call centers, including a reduction in average talk
time, higher call process ratio to agent, and an increase of first call resolutions to 88 percent,
signifying increases in overall productivity and ROI, and allowing the company to serve more
customers at a faster rate. Redknee and Microsoft’s strategic alliance continues to expand,
with recent commitments by Redknee to integrate its solution with SQL Server 2012, which
will further advance Redknee’s scalability and cloud-based offerings.
>>Conclusion
Managing the complex personalized life changing services that customers are growing to
expect, means systems and internal processes must now give customers the flexibility to set
usability controls, access limits, financial boundaries, and balance transfer mechanisms. To
be most effective in addressing customer needs, systems and associated processes must also
calculate and then notify customers of the financial impacts of an event or transaction as soon
as it occurs. Such solutions must address all high-volume transactions from whatever source,
regardless of how the final rating and charging strategy is defined to the end customer. This
includes transactions from human-generated events such as SMS messages, data sessions,
and voice calls, but also usage details from enterprise business solutions and those that
involve M2M actions.
So much of the customer relationship process today is oriented around the monetization and
customer interaction functions. These areas must now provide the greatest level of flexibility
to deliver a positive customer experience, to meet competitive pressures, and to keep the
total cost of ownership at a minimized level. If the flexibility to support new business models
and personalization options is limited, CSPs will have to forgo many of the opportunities
that are now here, or create major workarounds using existing systems. This approach will
lead to issues with accuracy, scalability, customer satisfaction and remaining current with key
marketing needs.
©Copyright Redknee Inc. 2013
Today’s changing business environment has produced a combination of new requirements
defined by multiple business drivers, as technology evolves and customer appetite for
new service options advances. Redknee’s billing and customer care system running on the
Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM stack is well suited to
address these changing needs in many situations.
As time evolves, additional change will come from business scenarios created by marketingdriven organizations that recognize how cloud-based services, cross-industry business
models and advanced M2M customer solutions are tomorrow’s business reality. It is
therefore essential that the business support solutions installed now be able to meet the
customer environment that continues to define our changing world.
For more information about Redknee’s real-time
monetization software, contact [email protected].
©Copyright Redknee Inc. 2013