Cable

Lifecycle Management Helps Cable Service Providers Achieve Business and Operational Excellence

New technologies are increasing consumer engagement with multiple forms of entertainment, creating opportunities for Cable Service Providers (CSPs) to reinforce the TV platform, and develop innovative, complimentary online products. In this multi-system environment, cable operators must offer subscribers a comprehensive choice of products — from basic cable to bundled offers that include HD, telephony, broadband Internet, hosting, IP-TV and set-top video-on-demand (VoD).

Facing Competitive Challenges

As new trends emerge, the market is becoming increasingly competitive and regulated. And you may need to overcome some tough business and operational challenges to continue to provide your customers with the best in entertainment, while maintaining your margins and achieving compliance.

In addition, traditional telecom Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) operators now offer products that are similar to those provided by cable Multi-System Operators (MSOs). To be successful, you must constantly develop more innovative and flexible product and service offers, and get them to market faster and more cost-effectively.

Developing Operational Efficiencies

Your consumers aren’t interested in your operational challenges, but they do expect exceptional customer service, systems that work together seamlessly and products that deliver exceptional subscriber value. To achieve these operational efficiencies, ensure customer satisfaction and contain your costs, your back-end service must span disparate BSS and OSS systems, as well as multiple, different technologies.

However, many cable operators still rely on billing systems to drive multiple, unrelated functions, from billing, provisioning and rating to workforce management and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service. This is more than most billing systems were designed to achieve.

To ensure effective packaging and rollout of product and service offers, cable service providers must optimize existing BSS and OSS systems. By carefully orchestrating your service operations, you will achieve seamless operational integration and ensure simultaneous, effective, agile delivery of your business and operational goals.

Transforming Business Delivery with Product and Service Catalogs

A consolidated approach to BSS unifies multiple service orders and workflow processes, while providing the front-end flexibility and customer experience to rapidly modify product offers, as well as create strong customer satisfaction and loyalty in the face of competitive offerings. Often described as product and order lifecycle management solutions, these software suites offer the following advantages:

Common data model ensures consistent product and bundle offerings across multiple verticals —Cable, HD TV, Broadband Internet, Telephony
New Customer Facing Services (CFS) are immediately visible for fast provisioning and self-care (Product Catalog), as well as network element visibility, tracking and exception handling (Service Catalog)
Self-care portals enable value-added services, showcase online options and distinctive market offers and create greater engagement, highlighting your unique service experience and competitive advantage

Fewer Truck Rolls

A unified order and product lifecycle management solution allows MSOs to track the lifecyle of a product bundle, and provide effective service orchestration and maintainance. By consolidating product and service catalogs, you’ll be able to provide your subscribers with faster, more responsive service that minimizes mistakes and involves far fewer truck rolls. Not only will you improve efficiency and contain costs, but you’ll also increase revenue, ROI and customer satisfaction.

ConceptWave Product and Order Lifecycle Management

The Product and Order Lifecycle Management Product Suite provides MSOs with a high performance solution to compete effectively across cable and multi-play environments. ConceptWave solutions, which easily integrate into existing operational environments, help you create, deploy and service product offers quickly.

Supporting any product in any market, from any channel, to any network, Product Lifecycle Management facilitates the definition, introduction, management and retirement of product and service offerings across distributed environments. Simple to administer, user-friendly and intuitive, this Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) product is highly customizable. It allows you to incorporate specific business requirements without the need for hard coding, and delivers value at an affordable price, typically within six months.

ConceptWave’s Order Lifecycle Management solution offers Cable Service Providers a high performance, flexible, scalable and agile way of automatically capturing and processing orders — from entry to fulfillment. It includes the following modules:

Order Entry Mechanisms (Order Negotiation-ON)
Product Catalog (Catalog Management-CM)
Order Decomposition and Workflow Management (Order Management-OM)
Management Reporting (Order Analytics-OA)

To learn more:

Read a Case Study about ConceptWave.