Vodafone India is launching a new prepaid charging system across seven calling circles, offering self-service functionality for half of its national prepaid customer base.
The new system enhances user experience and offers Vodafone new revenue-generating features and potential payment convergence across prepaid and postpaid segments. Legacy infrastructure will be replaced with Ericsson’s Charging System across five calling circles, Uttar Pradesh (W), Uttar Pradesh (E), Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh as a part of the five-year agreement. Vodafone is already using the system in its Mumbai and Maharashtra circles.
The Ericsson Charging System enables a host of new services like flexible refill, community charging and real time balance notifications. Customers will be able to adjust their plans themselves, improving their overall customer experience
It will also enable Vodafone to provide personalized offers to individual consumers by understanding their service consumption patterns. The deployment will also enable convergence across payment methodologies and devices, and enable Vodafone to activate enhanced data charging via mobile broadband charging in the future.
Commenting on the development, Vishant Vora, Director - Technology, Vodafone India said: "The fast-maturing Indian mobile internet consumers expect greater control and flexibility on the kind of services they want to consume, when they want to consume and how they would like to pay for it. The one size fits all and tiered pricing models for services are being fast replaced by a need for personalized services."
Chris Houghton, Head of Ericsson Region India, said: "Our solution creates greater monetization opportunities while simultaneously reducing the overall service activation, management and delivery costs. More importantly, it also provides Vodafone the flexibility to maintain one convergent system across all services, networks and payment methods."
The solution offers a dense computing platform, which can process almost double the traffic compared to the existing system. This will also help save on datacenter space and energy requirements. Advanced features will allow for better segmentation to drive higher revenue-generating services. These include personalized offer management, flexible refill and community charging.
Ericsson has been a long-term partner for Vodafone. In 2010, Ericsson was chosen by Vodafone as an exclusive 3G HSPA hardware, software and related service vendor to equip India's largest metropolitan cities Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata with the latest HSPA mobile broadband network.
