Commercial success with a new service is not just dependent
on its features, but also on the business model, pricing and customer support
that the service provider can offer. The ability to exploit new channel
relationships and to target specific niche markets with promotions that attract
and retain customers is essential to ensure maximal take-up and usage of the
service. Providing customers with efficient customer care and the ability to
manage their own service both enhances customer satisfaction and minimises
operations overheads for the Service Provider. On-line payments service
integration dramatically shortens the time from service usage to revenue
collection.
The DIGITALK Multiservice Platform incorporates a full set
of business support modules so that customers can move rapidly from service
creation and deployment to enhanced revenue generation. These features include:
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Service provisioning
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Service providers define the service profiles that allow them to offer
the features relevant to their target customers.
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Service activation
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Services can be instantiated immediately either by customer care or
directly by customers whether through IVR or sign-up on a web self-care portal.
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Customer care
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Service providers have the information to hand to support customers from
service activation and and usage to charging and payments.
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Customer self-care
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Customer can manage their own services through web self-care,
interactive voice response menus or service features access code giving them
greater flexibility and control while reducing the operations overhead for the
service provider.
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Tariff management
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Service providers have the subscription and tariff management tools to
execute highly competitive pricing offers and promotions, including recurring
fees, calling rates, service usage packages and add-on bundles. Wholesale rates
can also be established for agents and resellers allowing them the freedom to
price for local markets while the service provider ensures they gain a healthy
return.
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Real-time rating
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Real-time rating and balance management forms the foundation of
DIGITALK’s market-leading prepaid services but also enables service providers
offering postpaid charging the ability to apply real-time credit control to
minimise any risk of revenue loss.
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Cost and margin control
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As well as determining service pricing, providers can also exert
real-time control over their costs and margins by capturing carrier costs and
applying least cost routing to obtain the required quality of service at the
best available price. Without this capability, service providers risk offering
attractive rates to customers only to find their services are unprofitable.
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On-line payments
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On-line integration with payments services enables service providers to
capture revenue directly from customers. The DIGITALK Payments Server supports
integration with multiple on-line payment service providers, including Retail
Decisions, Paypoint and Servebase. 3D Secure is also supported to provide
customers added re-assurance that their e-commerce payments are being securely
handled.
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CDRs
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The DIGITALK Multiservice Platform provides full CDRs on all service
usage to enable customers to implement third party billing and reporting
solutions for pre- and post-paid services.
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Business reporting
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A full range of reports are provided enabling service providers to track
usage, revenues, costs and margins. Customers
can additionally integrate third party reporting packages with the DIGITALK
Multiservice Platform to support integrated reporting across network and
business systems.
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Wholesale services
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Service providers can implement reseller partitions to support wholesale
services, with all the above capabilities applied to manage the wholesale
relationship, including secure management access for the reseller to determine
their own price plans and monitor their services and ‘white label’ customer
self-care portals so that the reseller can present their own brand to the end
user.
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Open platform integration
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DIGITALK customers and partners have successfully exploited the open
integration capabilities of the Multiservice Platform to develop and integrate
their own or third party service and business management tools to meet their
specific business requirements, drive operations and service management
efficiencies and to offer competitive new service capabilities.
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