Meeting the Challenges of Top-Up Transactions

Neil Lilley, Director of Marketing, Telcordia

Prepaid wireless services are increasingly popular in most markets around the world. They provide convenience and flexibility to customers. Service providers, meanwhile, receive “up-front” revenue and avoid bad customer debt. Prepaid also allows providers to attract highly price-sensitive customers who must carefully manage their spending.

Virtually all prepaid wireless revenue is recharge, or top-up, revenue. So, for prepaid accounts, no transaction is more important than the top-up transaction. If funds cannot be quickly and seamlessly deposited into the prepaid account, then the service provider risks lost revenue and even lost customers.

An Expensive Minority

It’s easy to take top-ups for granted. The great majority of the time, the money gets deposited into the user’s account, quickly, smoothly, and easily. Service providers get paid and customers get the funds they need to continue using services.

However, top-up transactions that fail can be a serious problem. If only 1% of total transactions fail, it could cost a large carrier $8 to $10 million USD per year. Delayed or failed recharging transactions lead to time-consuming, expensive customer care calls and user calls and downloads that are postponed or never made. Even worse, customers sometimes swap their phones with one from another service provider in order to make calls. Revenue is not only lost, it accrues to a competitor, and there’s no guarantee that the customer will return, either.

A top-up transaction may seem simple, but it’s surprisingly complex. Recharging can mean interacting with any of several customer portal systems, the systems of the financial institution that’s providing the funds, and the provider’s own financial, customer, and network operations systems. At any step along the way, communications can break down. Servers overload, queues overflow, connections fail, data go missing, and devices malfunction. 

Visibility Is Key

So, how does a provider minimize top-up trouble? Encouraging customers to sign up for auto-recharging can help, as it’s the most reliable way to initiate a transaction.  However, in many markets this approach is not popular or practical.

But to significantly increase the top-up success rate, providers need to actively monitor key metrics at each step of the recharging process, end to end. It’s the only way to quickly find, diagnose, and correct conditions that lead to top-up failures.

This usually requires an advanced service management system – one that’s able to integrate all of the data involved and also visualize transaction processes for fast identification of trouble areas. The system should automatically and accurately spot recharging issues, and allow service providers to drill down into the data for quick root cause identification and to prioritize resolution. Many problems can be solved before they impact customers. Systemic, yet often subtle, errors can also be identified and prevented from recurring.

The metrics should be measured at each interface, including point of sale, recharging portals, transaction management layers, and the prepaid platform, as well as relevant partner systems. Data for all of these interfaces can be derived from various IT sources including alarms, response times, utilization stats, wait times, and so on.

The Benefits of Real-Time Information

A robust service management solution gives service providers the ability to take a more active – and even proactive – role in the management process.

For example, Operations and the Network Operations Center (NOC) are able to get real-time, end-to-end visibility, so they can detect and react to issues that impact customers along the entire recharge flow. Operations and the NOC can also correlate and pinpoint root causes instantaneously to quickly bring trouble tickets to closure, reducing mean time to resolution and improving efficiency.

Since the solution captures and synthesizes a wealth of transaction data, Marketing and Engineering can categorize the service quality and revenue per partner, the recharge method used, and other information. Substantial changes in recharge patterns can be detected, red-flagging potential problems or frauds.

Marketing can also gain visibility into the effect that various promotions may be having on top-up issues. In addition, Marketing and Product Management can better understand customer behavior, trends, and usage experience, so new offers and services can be tailored without having an impact on the platform.

 
Maximize Service Revenue

By ensuring a smooth top-up process, a state-of-the-art recharging management solution keeps customers where they belong and encourages their use of revenue-generating services. Problem root causes can be found and addressed quickly and problem reoccurance can be prevented. Customer Service can use transaction information to more effectively respond to customer questions. In addition, the provider can use the integrated network data to better understand customer behavior, trends, and the experience of using services from the customer’s point of view. This can fuel the development of services and offers that dovetail with customer wants and habits, leading to increased use of services and revenue growth.

With the continuing explosion in the number of prepaid accounts and the competition to gain users, an effective service management solution for recharging is a necessity – but one that offers only upside to service providers.

For more information, please contact Neil Lilley, Director of Marketing, Telcordia at nlilley@telcordia.com or visit our website.