Billing and Customer Care Market Review

“Service providers recognise that they need to launch new services to compensate for the decline in fixed voice and the decelerating growth of mobile voice revenue, but remain cautious about high-risk and high-cost investments in billing and customer care system upgrades.”

Service providers are upgrading their billing and customer care systems to support new, converged services and to improve customer support, but tend to do so in incremental steps rather than with large system conversions that carry high risks and high costs. The turmoil in the financial market is not fundamentally damaging the communications business, but serves to reinforce service providers' caution about costly projects. At the same time, they recognise that they must continue to drive the development of new services in order to compensate for the decline in the fixed voice market and the decelerating growth of mobile voice revenue.

This report provides recommendations for service providers and vendors, and analyses the key trends in the billing and customer care systems market. It identifies market drivers and inhibitors, and includes market share and forecast data for seven application segments:

• rating and pricing systems
• mediation
• interconnect and partner billing
• business optimisation
• CRM
• subscriber management
• customer interaction.
• For each segment and for the billing and customer care market overall, the report provides five-year growth forecasts for three geographic regions and four telecoms service segments.

Billing and customer care market review answers your key questions:

• What drives and inhibits service providers' spending on billing and customer care systems?
• What leads service providers to implement different types of billing system?
• Why will very few service providers transform their billing and customer care systems?
• What is the value of CRM, and what are its limitations?
• Why do service providers spend so much on professional services related to billing and customer care?
• How do the requirements of fast-growing emerging markets and those of more-saturated markets differ?
• What is the impact of consolidation among billing and customer care system vendors?
• Which factors are most likely to encourage a service provider to implement fully-convergent charging?

The report also identifies the leading suppliers in the market as a whole and each application segment, and compares the relative market position of billing and customer care system suppliers in different regions, telecoms service segments and application areas.