Hybrid approach
There is also a move to offer hybrid payment models, with 63% of respondents who are mainly North American and European service providers saying they were already offering hybrid (a mixture of prepaid and post-paid) payment models to customers such as prepaid monthly, no contract plans. Providing more service and payment choices and increasing customer loyalty are driving service providers' move toward hybrid service offerings. Responding to customer desire to control their spending and improving provider ability to assure their revenues (by moving pay-as-you-go prepaid customers to monthly plans, for example) are additional strong motivators for adopting hybrid service models.
"To remain competitive, service providers must go to market quickly with new prepaid and hybrid services, and need a charging environment that can provide this required agility and flexibility," said Erwann Thomassain, Amdocs' marketing director for Asia Pacific. "Service providers that can offer customers a broader choice of services will drive customers to use more services, increasing customer stickiness and spend."
For example, enhancing prepaid subscriber loyalty is a major business focus for Philippine-based Globe Telecom. Globe wanted increased business flexibility, particularly by reducing time to market for new services. But a complex, siloed service architecture was hindering the realization of these goals and was also expensive to operate and maintain.
Globe tapped Amdocs for a strategic transformation of its service layer to a common horizontal architecture. "We partnered with Amdocs to help us gain the agility to grab market share by attracting and retaining prepaid subscribers," said Mario Domingo, head of product design and service creation at Globe.