The SESMU Project: Integrated Customer Management for Multimedia Services

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1 The SESMU Project: Integrated Customer Management for Multimedia Services Luis A. de la Fuente, Telefónica I+D Javier Gallego, Telefónica I+D Pedro Llamas, Telefónica I+D Contact Author: Luis A. de la Fuente Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo (TELEFONICA I+D) Emilio Vargas, Madrid - Spain Phone: ; Fax: alberto@tid.es Abstract. This paper presents the activities undertaken in TELEFONICA I+D under the SESMU project to define an integrated customer management functionality for multimedia services. The defined functionality includes customer queries, trouble ticketing, billing management, contract management, inventory control and marketing support for services like satellite digital television distribution, cable television, telebanking and high performance access to Internet-based services (WWW, , FTP), all this in an integrated way. Keywords: Integrated customer management, multimedia services, business model, call center, subscriber management system, SESMU. Submission Area: Trials, case studies and experiences page 1

2 THE SESMU PROJECT: INTEGRATED CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT FOR MULTIMEDIA SERVICES 1 INTRODUCTION It seems to be clear the relevance service management has obtained. The days when the service was deployed first and, after that, its management system was installed, are gone. Today, and specially in the case of multimedia services, the service and its management are considered together and at the same time. However, one service management aspect is left outside this approach in most cases: customer management. The integration of customer management aspects with the rest of the service management ones is normally done afterwards, and, usually, only a handful of these customer aspects are considered. In order to deal with this, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo (the R&D company of the Spanish public network operator) has developed for Telefónica of Spain the SESMU project, whose final objective is the definition of the needed functionality for fully manage customers of any multimedia service in an integrated way. SESMU stands for Multimedia Services Management System. 2 THE CURRENT SCENARIO Multimedia services is a growing importance area in which a lot of activities are taking place. These activities are experiences in terms of pilots or demonstrators where technology experimentation has been more important than service development, in one hand, and real services being offered to final customers like cable and satellite digital television with recognized commercial deployment in the field, in the other one. The service management solutions vary enormously from almost no solution page 2

3 in the former, to ad-hoc partial solutions for the specific service involved in the latter. Whatever the case, the management of multimedia services is an area in which no standardized solutions nor international recommendations exist, although some activities are currently in progress in international consortia like TINA [1] or DAVIC [2] (in addition to the generic services management ones done by ITU-T [3] or NMF [4]). These activities, however, are not specifically oriented to customer management for multimedia services. When looking at the current customer management scenario, there are several aspects that are noteworthy: firstable, several systems are needed for customer management (a billing system, a troubleticketing system, a dispatching system, etc.), with null (or, in the best case, low) integration among them, although in some specific cases and for concrete services like satellite digital television, it is possible to find a system integrating some of the functionalities mentioned above. Secondly, each service has its own independent set of customer management systems. In this way, the same things must be done for different services in different systems (i.e., billing) due to the lack of integration. And thirdly, the service-level management systems have no relationship of any kind with the management systems of the networks used as infrastructure for the multimedia services. Faults or incidences in the network impacting the services are not known in the service management system due to this lack of interworking. This scenario has consequences for the multimedia services customers: they must address to one place or to another depending on the service involved, and, once addressed, different interfaces exist depending on the type of interaction customers want. Even worst, the service provider may know the existence of problems on the service through the troubles reported by the customers instead of by its management systems due to the previous mentioned lack of interworking among network and service management systems. page 3

4 In order to deal with this inefficiencies, SESMU defines an integrated customer management functionality to achieve the following goals: Provide to the customers one-stop window for any aspect concerning the service, like queries, subscription, billing, trouble-ticketing, etc. (integration of individual service management aspects). Provide to the customers one-stop window for any multimedia service (service integration). Interworking with services management systems in order to know relevant information for customer management. This information, for instance, can be obtained by the service management systems through their interconnection with network management systems (integration of service and network management aspects). With these goals, SESMU tries to improve the customer care to increase his satisfaction (as service user) and fidelity (very important in a competitive environment). Section 3 presents the approach followed in SESMU, and Section 4 describes the results obtained. 3 THE SESMU APPROACH The approach followed in the SESMU project has been threefold: Elaborate a multimedia business model to obtain the global picture for multimedia services, analyse several representative multimedia services to identify their customer management needs, and evaluate commercial products to check the characteristics of the solutions already available in the market. All of them are described below. page 4

5 Business model. In this model relevant aspects of the multimedia business are considered, not only the management ones. As in any model [5,6], actors, processes, information flows among actors and relationships among processes are identified. The actors are regulator, contents provider, contents programmer, information provider, service provider, access provider, network infrastructure provider, customer infrastructure provider, and customer. The processes are queries, marketing, provisioning, subscription, trouble ticketing, billing, contract modification, de-subscription, dispatching of field technicians, inventory and service management. Figures 1 and 2 show an example of the information flows and relationships identified. Customer Trouble notification Acceptance Information Clearance Notification Trouble notification Acceptance Information Clearance Notification Ticket Service provider Access provider Information Clearance Notification Figure 1. Information flows Customer queries process Trouble ticket Troubles Information Trouble ticketing process Credits, refunds Billing process Trouble ticket Dispatching process Ticket data Reports Marketing process Figure 2. Relationships among processes page 5

6 Services selected. Among the great number of possible multimedia services, some of them are selected to be analysed considering their representativeness of the different characteristics that can be found: different transmission media (copper, cable, satellite), different terminal required (cable modem and PC, decoder and TV-set, etc.), and different nature of the service (distribution-based, on-line and interactive). The selected services are: - Services based on television digital distribution for both satellite and cable. These services include channels grouping into packages (basic, premium, sports, etc.), pay per view (PPV), impulse pay per view (IPPV) and near video on demand (NVOD). - On-line services with high-performance access. Customers under the cable head-end coverage zone are assigned to a called service local area, that is geographically limited, where servers exist. In this way, customers can access the services through a broadband network using cable modems. It is possible to have different areas interconnected among them through an ATM backbone. The servers in one area can be accessed transparently by customers located in another one. The services considered are , FTP and WWW, as well as Internet access. - Telebanking service. This is an interactive service which enables customers to make the most common and frequent banking operations from home (obtain balance and information on recent movements in the account, make payments, etc.). An application loaded in the digital decoder either for satellite or cable allows these operations, using PSTN as back channel. The service provider is responsible to guarantee a secure access to the bank information providing the necessary authentication mechanisms. As mentioned before, this analysis leads to the identification of the customer management needs, solved by the functionality described in Section 4. page 6

7 Commercial products. Several products for customer management have been studied in terms of functionality, logical architecture and platform. In some cases they were products developed by software companies, while in others they were developed by multimedia service providers. Some of them have been tested working in a real-life environment. From the study, it was clear that they were designed to cover the minimum functionality required for the customer management of a given service (the service to whom they are targeted). Nevertheless, one major characteristic common to the studied products, is the fact that they are quite dependent on the service itself and, consequently, not reusable for a different service. Most of them appear to be closed applications facing customers management aspects specific to a certain service. For example, for a satellite based service of TV digital distribution, the lack of a network infrastructure will make the application not to cover issues such as dispatching of field technicians (needed for cable-based TV distribution). Another example is the billing functionality, due to the fact that the products only support the billing aspects of the service considered, and no others (for instance, products devoted to TV distribution based services support billing by events -for PPV or IPPV-, but not billing for volume of traffic -needed for on-line services-). The restrictions mentioned above -strong dependencies on the multimedia service considered, closed applications, lack of reusability for a different service- lead to an isolated customers management for the different multimedia services. Obviously, this could be irrelevant if one organization is offering just one service as its business, since it could be quite easy to find a commercial product fitting his management needs. But, if this organization wishes to offer different multimedia services and, therefore, have an integrated service management, these restrictions need to be solved. page 7

8 4 RESULTS ACHIEVED IN SESMU SESMU considers a fully-integrated solution to help telecommunication companies to satisfy the customer management requirements for multiple multimedia services. A choice based on a set of independent solutions which globally cover the needs (i.e., one specific solution for each service offered) is highly inefficient from both the technical and business points of view. For example, customer data duplication in as many databases as considered services, necessity to establish procedures for maintaining data consistency, impossibility to establish automatically relationships among information coming from different services (services to whom a customer is subscribed, geographical zones demanding more services, etc.), impossibility to know the general status of the business (considering all the services), etc. A choice based on an integrated solution will solve these drawbacks. SESMU results are: An integrated customer management functionality definition for multimedia services. A flexible and modular way to solve organizational aspects for the deployment of the customer management system. The definition of specific functionality targeted to support business managers. These results are describe below. Customers management functionality SESMU has defined a common set of functionalities for managing customers of multimedia services. This set is organized into several functional areas (billing management, subscription management, trouble-ticketing, etc.) that will be explained later on. Besides, specific features of each multimedia service concerning customer management have been taken into account. This implies page 8

9 that, for instance, data may be different depending on the service (data which need to be filled to make a subscription for a service, data of usage considered for billing and the way they are going to be collected, which subjects is the customer supposed to complain about, etc.) and, even, that certain functional areas can be of no relevance for one specific service (like dispatching of field technicians in a satellite based service). This is depicted in Figure 3. Specific Mgmt Features for Multimedia Service 1 Specific Mgmt Features for Multimedia Service 2 Specific Mgmt Features for Multimedia Service n Common Management Functionalities Figure 3. Common management functionality and specific features Functional areas defined in SESMU are the following: Customer queries. SESMU enables this facility for both current and potential customers. They may request information concerning service characteristics (availability of the service, time to provision, etc.), technical aspects (for example, needed equipment to use the service), billing data (only for current customers) or information about marketing campaigns. Demands of information may arrive via telephone (so customer service representatives -CSR- can satisfy customers requests on-line), fax or WWW. Requests can also be logged and later on tracked to obtain reports in order to improve business procedures, etc. page 9

10 Subscription management. SESMU manages new subscriptions (the provisioning activities that could be needed are triggered by SESMU, as well as the sending of the pertinent enabling commands once the provisioning has been completed), cancellations (temporal or definitive originated either by the customer or by the service provider for non payment situations) and modification of the subscription data (for example, changes in the customer s address or banking information, adding new services to the subscription, etc.). Trouble ticketing reported by customers. SESMU considers different tickets depending on the subject (billing, provisioning and faults) managing them in a differentiated way. Ticketing functionality includes the management of tickets during their processing (creation, treatment, and solution), and the acceptance from the customer of the solution given to his complaint, closing the ticket. It is possible to record data from closed tickets and obtain reports. Dispatching of field technicians. It involves activities like: Definition of a list with the necessary tasks, scheduling of the tasks, assignment of work to field technicians, keeping track of the evolution of the work, re-scheduling if needed, and generating notifications for customers when the work is done. An historical log is kept in the system for obtaining reports. Inventory control. SESMU provides facilities to enter identification data of new equipment into the system in different ways (manually, through ASCII files or coded bars), associate an state to it (in inventory, assigned to customer, assigned to field technician, lost, stolen, etc.) and keep track of transitions from one state to another. Besides, page 10

11 SESMU integrates inventory control functionality with other functional areas directly related to it, like subscription management, trouble ticketing, equipment addressability, etc. Support for marketing activities. Expected goals of marketing activities are to capture potential customers as well as make current ones to expand their subscriptions. SESMU supports these activities providing tools for defining campaigns, assigning specialized personnel to them, keeping track of their evolution over time, providing reports on the obtained results, etc. Billing management. SESMU provides functionality to recover service usage data, apply tariffs, discounts, and taxes, support different ways of payment (bank transfer, direct debit, credit card, etc.), settle accounts, personalize bills according to customers desires (format, language, level of detail,...), send billing data to external printing houses, disputes management, auditory facilities, manage past due payments, manage credits, generate reports, log historical data, etc. Equipment addressability. SESMU includes functionality to address installed equipment at customers premises for enabling/disabling, modify authorisations and rights, etc. Addressability is also used for security reasons (disabling in case of lost or stolen equipment, for example). Organizational aspects SESMU is organised in two components, as depicted in Figure 4: page 11

12 The Subscriber 1 Management System (SMS), that contains the customer management application and the data about customers and services. In addition to this, the SMS receives the information from the service management systems of each multimedia service considered. Due to the importance of this system, a high availability configuration is required as minimum (fault tolerance can be needed depending, for instance, on the number of customers being managed). The logical integration provided by the SMS is not in conflict with a distributed implementation of the system. The Call Center (CC), that acts as the one-stop window for the customers. In the CC is where the CSRs work. The CC is physically composed of a PABX, faxes, panels showing number relevant information (number of waiting calls, longest waiting time, etc.), and terminals. These are precisely terminals of the SMS from where the customer management application is accessed. In this way, the CSRs have access to any relevant information about customers and services stored in the SMS, and provide a personalized customer care. SESMU Subscriber Mgmt. System SMS Call Center CC Figure 4. The SESMU components The CSRs answer the queries of the customers, generate trouble tickets from complaints formulated by customers, modify personal data of customers when needed (address or bank account number modification), deal with customers subscription modification, etc. The CSRs, if needed, can be 1. The term subscriber will be used instead of customer for being the traditional one used for naming these systems. page 12

13 organised in several ways: especialised by service, especialised by topics (from attending any topic to attending only some of them), especialised by geographical area being served, etc. These organizations are not exclusive and can be used together. Customers typically interact with the CC through phone calls (toll-free number, for instance), although fax or web-based access can be also possible for certain functionalities (formulate a complaint, know which are the current promotions, or access to balance information) providing the right security procedures. The relationships between SMS and CC is not strictly limited to one-to-one. In fact, a high level of flexibility exists for adapting to specific needs. In this way, and depending on criteria like number of subscribers, geographical distribution of them, special characteristics of a group of customers (i.e., different language), CC specialized in one service, etc., more than one CC can be established, all of them supported by the same SMS (Figure 5). SESMU SMS CC CC CC Figure 5. Several CCs supported by one SMS In the same way, the SMS is not supposed to be unique. In fact, for security or load balance reasons, several SMSs can be established (each of them with their own CC) providing mechanisms for automatic information transferring among them, as well as for transferring incoming calls among CCs in case of overload (see Figure 6). Support for Executive Information page 13

14 SESMU SMS SMS CC CC Figure 6. Several SMSs interconnected SESMU is located in the TMN Service Management Layer [3] and can provide information to the Business Management Layer. The functionality defined in SESMU to provide this information has been called Support for Executive Information. The executive information is the information that summarises the essential parameters of the business. This information is used by business managers to take decisions in order to establish the strategy of the service operation with the evident purpose of increasing the business benefits. Executive Information Business Layer Key data from SESMU SESMU Service Layer Figure 7. Support for Executive Information The objective of the support for executive information functionality in SESMU is to provide business managers with specific reports (very summarised) about the key data managed by SESMU. The customer management integration of multimedia services achieved by SESMU enhances the value of these reports, as they will relate the relevant parameters of the services. The information provided by SESMU should be integrated with page 14

15 other information provided by other tools of the business layer (financial tools, planning tools) and with other information coming from external sources (market share, general polling, general economic indicators). The executive information provided by SESMU has the following characteristics: Concentrates only on key data for the business from the information SESMU has (number of customers, incomes by billing, subscription to services, etc.). Provides comparative analysis of the evolution of the key data, that can be easily summarised by different periods (weeks, months, quarters, years). Evaluates marketing activities results. This can be used for measuring their degree of success and for planning future marketing activities. Can be presented in easy understandable formats (tables, graphics, diagrams, etc.) Can be easily transformed to other formats required by specific presentation peripherals (color printers, projectors, etc.). 5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK This paper has shown how SESMU allows an integrated customer management for multimedia services. It also offers a modular and flexible solution for both addressing deployment issues and adding new management functionalities if required by new services. The activities lines that will be considered in the future are the following: Selection of additional multimedia services to be considered and integrated in SESMU from the customer management point of view. Evaluation of commercial products available as suitable platform for the SESMU system. Starting of the development of the SESMU functionality. page 15

16 Definition of the organizational aspects for the deployment of the SESMU (call centers, subscriber management systems, etc.). These activities will be considered in SESMU Phase II. REFERENCES 1. Berndt, H., de la Fuente, L.A., Graubmann, P.: Service and Management Architecture in TINA- C. TINA 95, February 1995, Melbourne, Australia. 2. DAVIC 1.0 Specification Part 04. Delivery System Architecture and Interfaces (Technical Report) 3. ITU-T Recommendation M.3010, Principles for a Telecommunications Management Network. 05/ Adams, E., Willetts, K.: The Lean Communications Provider, Mc Graw Hill, A Service Management Business Process Model. NMF The Market for Information Services and its Demands on TINA-C (TINA-C Enterprise/ Business Model). Version 2.0. March page 16