Navigating Policy Management – And Thriving

Nothing is more important today than customer focus. Sharpening customer focus means accepting a  higher cost, lower profit operation, doesn’t it?

Lowering cost is also a major focus of every contemporary communications service provider, all of which are subject to free market economic forces in a way they never have been before during a particularly difficult economic period. Lowering costs means dulling customer focus, doesn’t it?

Using traditional business models, the contradiction between the two would be paralytic. Today, the patient does not have to be paralyzed. In fact, the answer to both can be a loud “No!"

"Customer focus and cost reductions are the prime focus areas for telecoms service providers today," said Ovum Ltd. researchers Clare McCarthy and Mark Giles. "If tackled correctly, these objectives are not mutually exclusive: They are complementary."

The Ovum conclusion is the central premise of a new V2M Report entitled, “A New Era for Policy Management: The Move to LTE and Ubiquitous Video is Changing How Policy is Implemented."

As V2M Editor-in-Chief Tara Seals puts it in the Report’s V2M Takeaway: “Striking an appropriate balance between cost and functionality while maintaining customer engagement and growing new revenue is impossible using the traditional models that communications service providers have relied upon for the last few decades. A new approach to policy, one which allows the operator to move beyond basic bandwidth-congestion management into an intelligent, service-aware environment with convergent charging integration, marries network optimization with opportunities for creating tailored customer offerings and on-the-fly revenue options based on actual network and service usage can fulfill these requirements."

Transformative changes are reshaping how people and businesses communicate, and in the process are transforming CSPs globally. These changes coincide with daunting worldwide economic challenges, which also are reshaping business imperatives for CSPs. This confluence of fundamental changes can either be damaging or constructive.

The choices CSPs make in the next few years on policy management will go a long way toward determining which CSPs succeed and which do not in the coming decade. Those choices are Homeric in their implications.

Policy management provides a way to navigate successfully, like Homer’s Odysseus, between the monster Scylla (higher cost) and the whirlpool of Charybdis (inadequate customer focus).

The new V2M Report on “A New Era for Policy Management" is available, free, here.

Larry Lannon is group publisher of VIRGO’s Communications Network, which includes Billing & OSS World, Channel Partners and V2M.