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By: Chris Corus, Senior Software Engineer, ATS

Hello mates and welcome to the ATS Developers’ Corner.  Today we are going to talk about a process under development at ATS to provide Feature Bundle Optimization information to a Telco Customer Representative.  Over time, changes are made to the bundle structures such that one can find bundles with more features for less money than a Customer might currently have or perhaps a Customer has purchased all their features one at a time and there is a Feature Bundle that would provide all the Customer’s Features at less cost.  This would be considered a form of "over-billing" which could potentially lead to customer dissent and possible churn.  By utilizing the Feature Bundle Optimization process, a customer service representative has the opportunity when a customer calls in to provide them with information to potentially save them money and increase their satisfaction with the phone company.  As we all know, happy customers remain as customers. 

I would like to quickly take you through a few steps in our process to give you a better understanding of how we can accomplish this. 

The Required Data

Let’s suppose we have some Business and Residential Bundle files.  The examples below assume that the Customers reside on a Nortel DMS-100 switch.  Here are a few sample lines:

Business Bundle File Example

Residential Bundle file Example

Then, using a billing file such as the following, we check to see if customers actually have the most cost efficient bundle.

Billing File Example

The Customer Feature bundle would be compared against either the Business or Residential Bundles, and the most cost effective bundle that has all of the Customer’s features is chosen even if it adds Features to the Customer’s package.

The Results

The results could be something such as: 

Conclusion

We have given a glimpse of an algorithm, the implementation of which is currently being explored by the Developers at ATS.  It shows the type of Telco data that can be combined to provide better information to a Telco Customer Representative so that Customers can benefit from reduced Feature Bundle cost.  While from a pure revenue assurance prospective this process may appear to reduce revenue, the long-term effect would be positive in nature as it would increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn. 

Let us know what you think of this on-going work at info@atso.com.