DST Group is in the middle of a converged billing transformation project, which started in March. The first phase of the initiative, implemented by Redknee, replaced DST's existing wireless postpaid billing platform with a real-time converged billing and customer-care solution.
The main objective, DST CEO Idris Vasi said, was to improve its customer service operations by using subscriber data to increase loyalty and revenues. The next step is to move beyond postpaid and enable cross-bundling between mobile, broadband and potentially its pay-TV and ISP services.
DST, the leading provider of mobile and mobile broadband service in Brunei with an 82% market share, offers 2G, 2.5G and 3G mobile services in addition to mobile broadband via a nationwide HSPA network. The country has a mobile penetration of 105%.
Vasi and Redknee CEO Lucas Skoczkowski talked recently to Telecomasia.net about the drivers and challenges behind the project.
What are the key drivers behind your move to transform your business?
Idris Vasi: We want to be more agile in rolling out services, from a time-to-market perspective, but also to give customers more variety and options -- things that we weren't able to do before with flat-rate billing. Our billing transformation is also tied to the network transformation side, because the billing systems have to integrate with our network infrastructure equipment. But the primary driver is on the services transformation side.
What were the key benefits that DST was looking to achieve?
Vasi: It is about flexibility -- the ability to do converged billing, billing policy management, session management and provide much more choice and control to customers.
One of the challenges is that between 10% and 20% of customers use up 80% of the bandwidth. They use a lot of video, they create a lot of peer-to-peer traffic. One way to manage this issue is to limit or stop these customers, but that is not our intention. Session control and subscriber management are important to us. Billing systems play a major part, because you need your billing system to be adaptable to look after all these different scenarios.