Technistic News & Research

This week we are taking a minor diversion and looking at the trend towards "opt-in" . Customers are no longer happy to accept a generic product that satisfies only 80% of their needs. At the same time they don't want to pay for 20% of a product's features that they have no use for. This is pushing service providers towards an opt-in model where customers can pick and choose which features they are willing to pay for and those that they won't. These needs are likely to change over a customer's lifetime, so provide customers with the flexibility of adding or removing features as required. The implications for service providers are: Break-down products into small feature sets that can be easily understood by the customer; Simplify your billing rules so that when combining multiple feature sets, the total cost to the customer can be easily calculated and; Provide customers with the ability to activate new products as they require them and provide them with self-s

Following on from our previous post on Service Modelling , we thought we would discuss the service catalog. Wait, is that a service catalog or a product catalog? If you remember, a product is something we sell to a customer. Most businesses would be familiar with a product catalog. At a restaurant the product catalog is called a menu. For some reason, telecommunications service providers struggle with the concept of the product catalog and this is usually because they confuse the definitions of products and services. The product catalog should contain all the items you advertise and sell to your customers. There are usually many more products than service types, as each product has a unique set of pricing information. If you sign customers up for fixed term contracts for example, each contract length defines a different product, even though the type of service provided to the customer is the same. The service catalog on the other hand is what drives the operational side of the

After a long hiatus of just on 12 months we're back. We will be continuing our series of weekly posts on service management for service providers. Stay tuned.