Role of Business Support System

Business support systems (BSS) are the components that a telephone operator or telco uses to run its business operations towards customer. BSS and OSS 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:

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 and customer loyalty programmes.

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

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.