Efficient management is the foundation of every well-functioning company in the telecom industry. What makes a reliable business support system? What features and integrations should it include?
Today, it’s hard to find a telecom company that functions without BSSs (Business Support Systems). Together with the OSS (Operations Support Systems), they constitute a complementary system that covers all the areas of the company’s functioning. What does it mean in practice? Is it necessary for the telecommunications service providers to develop your custom business support systems, or it’s enough to rely on the existing platforms?
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The business support system in a nutshell
Business support systems are responsible for handling four types of processes: customer management, revenue management, product management, and order management. As particular components, they may serve different purposes, like processing orders, prospecting, or solving customer issues. Based on Comarch’s offer, these components may include:
- application integration framework
- convergent billing system
- product catalog
- customer order management
- digital self-service
- CRM for telecoms
- BSS Mediation
BSS may cover both B2B and B2C-related processes, increasing their efficiency, making them more cost-effective, boosting customer satisfaction, improving customer relationship management, fault management and service assurance, reducing the number of errors, and much more.
Custom or off-the-shelf business support systems?
Business support systems play such a crucial role in optimizing business processes in the telecom industry that they should meet your needs 100%. That doesn’t mean that you need to create new solutions from scratch. Reaching out to reliable, experienced providers, you can pick various modules in different configurations and customize them by choosing the functionalities and integrations.
An extensive number of features that are not necessarily useful may have a negative impact on the telecom business process, so it’s better to limit them to the essential ones. Reliable providers offer solutions modular by design so that you can have maximum control over their shape. You should be able to introduce third-party integrations, too. Note, however, that the more third parties you engage, the less efficient the systems may be when cooperating together.
The choice of BSS telecom systems and their structure depends on the size and specifics of the telecom network and many other variables. Aside from offering advanced customization, a flexible provider should offer you an option to choose between on-premise and SaaS solutions for BSS in telecom. In some cases, on-premise variant might be a safer choice due to security requirements.