Business Support Systems
Encyclopedia
Business support systems (BSS) are the components that a telephone operator
Telephone operator
A telephone operator is either* a person who provides assistance to a telephone caller, usually in the placing of operator assisted telephone calls such as calls from a pay phone, collect calls , calls which are billed to a credit card, station-to-station and person-to-person calls, and certain...

 or telco
Telephone company
A telephone company is a service provider of telecommunications services such as telephony and data communications access. Many were at one time nationalized or state-regulated monopolies...

 uses to run its business operations towards customer. BSS and OSS
Operations support system
Operations support systems are computer systems used by telecommunications service providers. The term OSS most frequently describes "network systems" dealing with the telecom network itself, supporting processes such as maintaining network inventory, provisioning services, configuring network...

 platforms are linked in the need to support various end to end services. Each area has its own data and service responsibilities.

Role of business support systems

Basically it deals with the taking of orders, payment issues, and revenues.
The role of business support systems in a service provider is to cover four main areas:
  • Product management
  • Customer management
  • Revenue management
  • Order management

Product management

Product management supports product development, the sales and management of products, offers and bundles to businesses and mass-market customers. Product management regularly includes offering cross-product discounts, appropriate pricing

Customer management

Service providers require a single view of the customer and regularly need to support complex hierarchies across customer-facing applications (customer relationship management
Customer relationship management
Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...

). Customer management also covers requirements for partner management and 24x7 web-based customer self-service. Customer management can also be thought of as full-fledged customer relationship management systems implemented to help customer care agents handle the customers in a better and more informed manner.

Revenue management

Revenue management is a BSS focus on billing, charging and settlement, that can handle any combination of OSS services, products and offers. BSS revenue management supports OSS order provisioning and often partner settlement.Billing is an integral function offered by BSS systems and is not under the perview of Operation Support Systems.

Order management

Order management as a beginning of assurance is normally associated with Operational Support Systems though Business Support Systems are often the business driver for fulfillment management and order provisioning.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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