The SME market is very competitive, so carriers need to work hard to hold on to their position, said Peter McClelland, CEO of Dunfermline-based Cult Hill Innovation Ltd, CHIL, an ISV whose Tariff Review Service Solution is in use by Orange Business Services to underpin its customer retention infrastructure.
McClelland said the CHIL platform is a bulk processing capability that Orange has deployed as a rating and discounting engine, operating as an adjunct to its production billing system.
In addition to the software licensed to OBS, CHIL also has a SaaS offering for telecoms resellers called Customer Acquisition and Retention Service, CARS. This is another flavor of the technology, hosted by us, that enables people selling telco services into SMEs to craft the most appropriate offers on the fly, said McClelland.
McClelland said there are two other areas where its technology can deliver benefits. First, there is tariff modeling, to proactively understand how revenues and offerings will be affected by specific tariffs, he said. Then there is tariff building, providing Lego-like ‘bricks’ with which to put together different service bundles for more creative offers.
While CHIL’s technology is an inherently back-end system designed to facilitate rapid service creation, McClelland said the tariff-building flavor could eventually be exposed to end customers for them to build and rebuild their own tariff plans as they go along. This is a scenario that would be more appropriate for larger corporate customers with dedicated teams looking at optimizing their telecoms cost base.
