Product configuration: How to streamline offer management with BSS

Customer expectations of telcos are rising, with demands for personalized and seamless digital experiences only increasing. The pressure is on for CSPs to continually offer fresh and tailored products, or risk losing customers to competitors.

That’s why, from enhancing customer satisfaction to reducing lead times, offer management is vital to the B2B sales process. Benefitting both business and customer, product configuration and offer management provide customers with the exact solution they’re looking for whilst providing organizations with a competitive edge and a future-proof business model. But this is easier said than done. Assessing customer segments and crafting personalized offerings, all whilst protecting profit margins can quickly become overly complex for CSPs, especially when faced with multiple product systems and catalogs. That’s where Business Support Systems (BSS) step in.

From catalog management to dynamic offer creation, BSS solutions make reaping the rewards of product configuration and offer management hassle-free. In this blog, we’ll explore how the right BSS partner can reimagine the product configuration and offer management into a lucrative process for bottom lines and customer satisfaction.

Understanding the product configuration and offer management process

Your customers expect offerings that feel tailor-made—because they are. Product configuration and offer management work together to make this happen. The product configuration process primarily covers the designing of the core product, including market research, setting pricing, and catalog integration and management.

Offer management looks at taking the core product and creating offers and sub-products based on customer segmentation and need. This includes setting offer rules, configuring pricing and discounts, sales and fulfillment, monitoring, and adjustment.

Together, they form the backbone of a customer-first approach, delivering both strategic flexibility and competitive advantage. But for many CSPs today, delivering on these efficiently is a struggle, whether it’s from overly complex systems, the need for manual intervention, or balancing revenue management and billing.

BSS: The engine behind seamless offer management

BSS solutions are able to make the offer management process much simpler, requiring less manual input and delivering tailored customer products as needed. By streamlining complex systems, BSS ensure the offer management problem is not only straightforward but also delivering on profitability and customer satisfaction.

• One centralized system: BSS allows organizations to manage all offers from a single centralized system, ensuring consistency in pricing, product availability, and service bundling. This setup allows for quick updates across all channels and reduces the time needed to launch new offers.
• Advanced automation: BSS automates order-to-cash processes, handling everything from order capture to service activation and billing. Automation reduces the need for manual input, lowers errors, and accelerates the delivery timeline, enhancing customer satisfaction.
• Dynamic personalization: BSS leverages customer data and usage patterns to offer personalized promotions and dynamically adjust offerings based on market demand.

Key components of BSS for offer management

BSS solutions work across offer management processes to streamline operations end to end and deliver a reimagined and personalized customer experience. Let’s explore the pillars that make BSS indispensable for CPSs:

Product Catalog Management

Managing multiple systems for different vendors, parallel systems, and complex product definition and management can overwhelm even the most capable teams. CSPs need a simple and seamless way to produce and present new product offerings to their customers.

BSS solutions for product catalog management work to centralize product information, enabling efficient updates and consistent product data across systems. Plug and play catalog publishing incorporates multiple catalogs into one standard interface, resulting in greater efficiency and faster time to market for new services.

Automated product rollout also allows CSPs to create and manage catalogs of complex product offerings to quickly respond to market changes and customer demand with new products and updates to old ones, meaning CSPs can catch revenue earlier and enhance customer experience.

Revenue Management

With the increasing need to offer new and fresh product offerings to customers, CSPs need to ensure that despite a faster time to market, offerings remain profitable and billed accurately.

The right BSS solution can handle the entire revenue chain, supporting accurate billing and preventing revenue leakage. This is essential for streamlined pricing and promotions enabling CSPs to keep up with shifting customer needs without compromising on profitability. With full visibility over all revenue-related results, CSPs can manage and optimize revenue streams.

Order and Service Management

As offer complexity grows, managing quote and order processes for CSPs becomes increasingly challenging. When new demands require manual intervention, CSPs can then see delays, revenue leakage, and a negative customer experience.

The right BSS partner can facilitate seamless order processing and delivery. By enabling users to easily navigate product catalogs to select the right set of products for customers’ needs, BSS can make tailoring and delivering product offers a streamlined and easily managed process. With an automated solution, CSPs can manage the order lifecycle with dynamic order decomposition, fulfilling complex and bundled orders quickly and accurately.

Benefits of product configuration with BSS

BSS solutions deliver multiple benefits across the product configuration and order management lifecycle.

• Enhanced agility: By reducing time-to-market and helping create a one-stop shop for customers, BSS solutions allow CSPs to respond quickly to market changes and ensure customers are always receiving the best product offering for their specific needs.
• Operational efficiency: Using advanced automation and enhanced digital capabilities, BSS reduces the need for manual intervention, thereby reducing manual errors and lightening your team's administrative load.
• Personalized customer experience: Real-time data from BSS around customer segmentation enables tailored offer creation and boosts customer satisfaction, as customers receive a personalized offering crafted to answer their requirements.

Dynamic offers made easy with BSS

Offer management doesn’t have to be yet another timely, complex process to add to the list. CSPs working alongside the right BSS partner for product configuration and offer management see enhanced operational efficiency, reduced time-to-market, greater customer satisfaction, and lower revenue leakage. Not only this, but BSS can be crucial to driving growth for CSPs, as optimized product configuration and personalized customer engagement help cut churn and drive customer loyalty.

ZIRA’s suite of product configuration and offer management tools work end to end to streamline operations and deliver tailored customer offers without complexity or manual work headaches. Reach out today to find out how ZIRA offer management could reimagine your connectivity offering.