Ontrack follows two other products from Subex in the telecom revenue maximisation sector - Ranger, a telecom fraud management solution, and Incharge, a revenue assurance solution. It is also part of the RevMax suite, targeted on helping telcos maximise their revenues and profits, by addressing revenue leakages. While Ranger and INcharge tackle fraud and billing/process-related issues, ONtrack manages subscriber risk by proactively tracking possible delinquents and also facilitating handling and exchange of information across departments and groups, thereby limiting the revenue loss that may be suffered by the operator.
In the opinion of Subex, subscriber delinquency is a real problem in every operator irrespective of the region. Various surveys estimate that the un-collectable debt is around 3% to 10% of total revenues even in the more mature markets. In a typical risk lifecycle of a customer, the operator first has to disallow poor quality customers, but should also be careful enough so that a deserving customer is not denied the service. During the usage and payment cycle, merely monitoring intra-cycle build-up may not be adequate since that does not give the operator an insight into his capacity to pay for usage. Finally, when the customer does not pay his bills before the stipulated payment date, it becomes crucial to be aware of his past behaviour.
A holistic view of all the activities of the customer not only helps in better prioritising the operator's moves, but also helps in understanding the customer and thus increases the recovery while also improving the customer's experience. "Most operators currently lack such an integrated end-to-end approach to subscriber risk management and instead look at each activity as independent silo-ed operations which are aggravated by organisation boundaries, thereby decreasing the effectiveness of the processes, if any. Ontrack aims to help the operator get the complete picture with regard to his customers," said Sudeesh Yezhuvath, COO, Subex Systems. "Given the universal nature of the problems being addressed by ONtrack, we foresee tremendous potential in both developed and developing economies. Thus, communications service providers in all the geographies and across different technologies like GSM, CDMA, wireline etc. constitute the market for this product."
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