Communications Service Providers' evolution to digital continues, and to facilitate this progression, Business Support Systems that enable a myriad of service innovations needs to develop in tandem to ensure that service providers can continue to take advantage of various fast emerging revenue-generating opportunities. And why not? The telecom billing landscape is undergoing dramatic changes. The growth of digital products and services, including content, apps, the cloud, e-commerce, m-commerce, video, and the Internet of Things (IoT) means that BSS now needs to support and manage a vast network of interconnected partners and relationships.
The Challenges
For communications and content service providers, this presents a unique set of challenges. These include overcoming declining revenues from traditional services, adapting to new and non-familiar business models, launching innovative new services, onboarding multiple new partners in complex value chains, investing in new higher-growth service areas, and dealing with new competitors.
Today’s evolving service provider must also be agile enough to launch new plans and services as quickly as its marketing department creates them, turning its back office into a genuine revenue generator.
That may sound like an huge challenge for every service provider. But help is at hand. The solution lies in supporting new business models and new relationships with new partners, with each bringing different requirements for revenue sharing models. This is where partner management and smart revenue sharing comes in.
Smart Revenue Sharing is the Answer
Using partner management and smart revenue sharing, service providers can interact smoothly and seamlessly with all the partners within their ecosystem, irrespective of whether they are MVNEs, MVNOs, OTT providers, content aggregators, application developers, mobile money and payment service providers, utilities or banks.
Each of these sectors has its own set of rules, its own business logic and its own way of doing business. As the telecom market becomes increasingly sophisticated, so the development of these personalized relationships will become more important.
Making Smart Revenue Sharing Work
Partner management and smart revenue sharing mean that new revenue streams can be created, for example, by introducing bundle offers together with content providers (music, video and other digital goods) and providing overall support for today’s digital lifestyle, IoT and the connected world.
Service providers are able to implement solutions that facilitate partner management, settlements and revenue-sharing relationships. These solutions can enable a service provider to create personalized contracts and relationships with each and every one of the partners in its ecosystem; speed up and automate the partner onboarding process; manage and settle telecom and non-telecom partnerships with ease; provide support for an unlimited number of revenue sharing and hierarchy levels; offer advanced self-care so that partners can manage their preferences; and enable revenue sharing and sponsored data services.
BSS therefore is no longer just about the relationships between the service provider and the end users, but also about efficiently managing the relationships with all the involved partners. With partner management software in place, a service provider will increase its attractiveness to the entire ecosystem and will benefit from improved business relationships; reduced total cost of ownership; fast time-to-market and of course, be able to create new revenue streams and ultimately, increased revenues.
In today’s fast-moving digital landscape, smart revenue sharing offers a solution to managing and scaling with any demands today’s communications and digital service providers are presented with, as well as turning both back office and marketing departments into revenue generating channels.
