One family, one data plan
At last count, my family had seven data-hungry devices connected to my service provider's network, using four separate data plans. This means that on a monthly basis, we get four different bills, and need to keep track of usage on four different accounts.
To me, it would make perfect sense to have one, easy-to-understand family data plan. This would be easier to manage and it would enable me to save some money. For example, there would be better notification as to when family members were close to going over their designated data allotment.
Service providers, it seems, aren't quite ready to offer family data plans. Most of them initially came up with all-you-can-eat data plans. This made sense when most families had only one or two devices consuming data. But this is not the case anymore, with families having six, eight, and even 10 connected devices.
For a Tier-1 service provider, today's family-device scenario can mean supporting up to 500 million data plans, and that's before taking into account enterprise and machine-to-machine services. Supporting these devices is one matter; monetizing data on them and ensuring customers have a consistently positive experience is another issue entirely.
This is why it is important for service providers to rethink their strategy and evolve towards offering value-based data-pricing schemes. Service providers can only get there by bridging the gap between their business-support systems (BSS) and the network. Only by bridging this gap can service providers achieve a view of the customer across all the devices and the data services the customer is using, and the different networks that support them.
This holistic view can then enable service providers to offer a consistent and optimised, quality-based, real-time customer experience.
Amdocs' acquisition of Bridgewater Systems and the coupling of Bridgewater's policy control and subscriber data-management solutions with Amdocs' real-time charging technology will bridge this gap between the BSS and the network, and allow service providers to benefit from some very interesting - and valuable - use cases.
For example, going back to my family, we could share a single, consolidated plan across my wife's iPhone (on a 3G network), my iPad (on a 4G network), and our home broadband connection, all at preferred bandwidth speeds. We'd no longer need four data plans, of which we only use 30 per cent. We would have one easy-to-understand plan personalised for my family, based on what we value. Furthermore, this plan could include additional aspects of our family's usage patterns such as an International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) package, an HD movie package, or any other additions.
Service providers get this, because they know there is more they can do to monetize data services than just get their share as a transmission pipe. It's about offering services and plans that customers want, and in which they see value. But to deliver this value, and personalize their customers' experience, they - and the industry more broadly - must start thinking about policy and charging as intertwined. They cannot have them siloed and expect to create use cases with which customers can identify, much less buy into.
Ultimately, getting my family's four data plans down to one, with us all getting what we want, would be valuable to me. I'd probably even pay a premium for it.
Rafi Kretchmer is director of Cross-Portfolio Marketing at customer-experience systems company Amdocs.
