While there are many tech companies offering online charging solutions, not all are created equal. It’s an extremely technical field. The lingo alone can be overwhelming.
One minute you’re searching the web for a real-time charging solution and the next you’re swimming in a sea of acronyms, some of which contain letters that stand for even more acronyms. You might be tempted to make a hasty, less than informed decision, but that could lead to some major problems for your business down the road. Luckily, we’ve put together a list of things to look for when it comes to choosing an OCS.
Features you must seek in your next-gen OCS.
KNOW MORE : Why You Need to Upgrade to a Cloud-Based Online Charging System
Below is a descriptive analysis of these features and their relevance in a modern-day telecom billing operation.
Scalability
Leaving room to grow is important for any business, but sometimes it can be a little painful. There’s no need to add to it by settling on the wrong OCS service provider. You need to know that your service provider is going to be there with your business every step of the way, offering you and your customers the best, and most reliable services and solutions that grow and evolve as you do. Some questions for your online charging provider include:
“Will the solution scale horizontally when my subscriber base increases substantially?”
Or “Will increasing peak loads be met by the OCS?”
Only when you are able to find an OCS supplier that can answer these 2 pertinent questions convincingly with his OCS solution, you should think about using its services for your telecom business.
Flexibility
Whether you’re just getting started or making the upgrade to an OCS, ensuring flexibility and compatibility is paramount. Any online charging system worth its salt comes standard with convergent billing between pre and postpaid plans and real time charging within milliseconds of a transaction. You should also be able to maximize your profit by minimizing leakage and adding more revenue streams. All of this should be able to be fully integrated with your IN network.
Also, you should look for an OCS that is capable of accommodating newer and more complex services like IoT, OTT and 5G. Without provisions for these services, your OCS will soon require a makeover, which will definitely hurt you financially. It is best to look for an OCS system that is create with the mindset of supporting future services.
READ MORE: Prevent Your Customers from Bill Shock with a Future Proof Online Charging System
Unparalleled Customer Service
Exceptional customer service should be a part of any and every service provided or item sold. That being said, not all service providers focus so heavily on the customer care side of things. With potential risks such as call, text message, and data session failure, you’ll need near instant responses from your online charging provider. You need a provider that puts your customers first with friendly representatives and by adhering to clearly defined SLA’s.
Security
OCS has an ABMF function that keeps record of customers information at all times. This information simply cannot be compromised in any case. Hence, your OCS should come bolstered with relevant security measures, so you can perform your work with complete peace of mind. Also, it is essential that the security is enhanced from time to time, so that new threats do not get the better of the system. Especially services like IoT need to be fortified with sound security parameters. As IoT devices generate copious amount of data every second, the security risk is much higher in IoT use cases. By employing Telgoo5 as your OCS provider, you get a unique public IP address that automatically enhances the security of your platform.
Reporting and analytics
Analyzing customer behavior is part and parcel of any modern telcos operation. While looking for an OCS solution, you should look for a vendor that supplies it with necessary reporting and analytical capabilities built into the system. This will allow you gain vital insights about customers behavior and shape your operations to meet their evolving requirements. At Telgoo5, you get access to a slave data base that is updated by all the billing and charging information stored in the master data base.
Ease of entering new partnerships with APIs
For a telecom operator to be successful in the current state of the telecom industry, it needs to forge new partnerships. Partnerships are important as they allow telcos to reduce their burden and focus exclusively on their core competencies. However, management of new partnerships and accounting for each and every detail is not as easy as it seems. Not only you have to find trustworthy vendors to undertake your crucial tasks, you also have to account for every transaction. In the past, telcos required only a few partnerships to sustain their work e.g. for interconnect billing. But now, there is a need to support complex work models with an emerging requirement to communicate complex services like OTT, IoT, 5G etc. Hence, you should look for an OCS provider that also has the capability to deliver APIs to support different business use cases.
SEE HERE : 5 Signs Of A Great OCS – Online Charging System
For example: in case, you want to deliver IoT SIMs to your subscribers and your current vendor does not have the capability to serve all your requirements, you can use the API provided by your OCS provider to use its pre-existing partnerships. With Telgoo5, you get access to many useful APIs to fulfill several pertinent business requirements.
Fault tolerance
A system as complex as an OCS – no matter how good it is – can develop faults at any given time. However, in the current state of the telecom industry, you cannot afford to stop your operations lest you want to incur major revenue losses. This is why; you should always invest in an OCS with good fault tolerance. A quality OCS provider will always supply you with an OCS that not only has high fault tolerance but also integrates self-diagnostic capabilities. This means the OCS will remain functional even when there is a fault. Also, it will be able to diagnose the fault on its own without bringing the whole billing and charging process to a halt. Such an OCS will ensure that your billing is always operational and your business does not suffer at all.
Safety of data with cloud-based OCS
Investing in a cloud-based OCS, not only reduces capital investment, it also ensures more safety of your data. With a cloud-based OCS, copies of your billing-related data will be stored on different sites i.e. data centers. So, in case of an unforeseen unfortunate event, if one of the sites gets compromised, you can always access the data from a different site. Cloud-based OCS offered by Telgoo5 is a safe investment as it keeps your billing-related data safe from natural and human-inflicted disasters.
In this ever changing climate of communications technologies it can be difficult to stay current, but it’s even harder to catch up. With our charging platform, Telgoo5, you won’t have to. Our innovative team works hard to provide you with the best in class online charging system available. Our customer service is operational 24/7 and 365 days of a year, which means you can call us at any time you want. The agents that we have employed are logical and always take a step-by-step approach to unearth the real cause of an issue and provide easy-to-understand instructions, so you can easily solve any issue.