- Customer Facing Services
- Resource Specifications
- A Price Plan
A Customer Facing Service is defined in SID as: “A Customer Facing Service is an abstraction that defines the characteristics and behaviour of a particular Service as seen by the Customer. This means that a Customer purchases and/or is directly aware of the type of Service and is in direct contrast to a Resource Facing Service which support Customer Facing Services but are not seen or purchased directly by the Customer.”
The key point to this definition is the word seen. The Customer (or more precisely the End User Party Role) perceives the service “Outbound Voice Call”, for example, as nothing more than that. The End User does not perceive the switching, encryption, error correction, radio frequency hops, base station transfers, multiplexing and demultiplexing that may go on in the background.
The Product Offering is thus defined in terms of the Services that an End User perceives, values, and may be charged for.
The SID does not contain the concept of Supplementary Service, which is after all a network (GSM) related artefact and should not (in the ideal world) be used when describing or pricing products and services to Customers and End Users.
Clearly defining a Product Offering, for example “3G Anytime” solely in terms of the services perceived by the End User will not help when the Product Offering is sold (as a Product Offering Subscription) to be provisioned in the network or on the Billing System, but that is precisely the objective of the SID. By allowing an Offering to be defined independently of how it is implemented as a step in the direction of Service Oriented Architectures Holy Grail – Loosely Coupled Architecture, where each domain defines what it wants in the way of services, not how the services are to be implemented or built.
Clearly a Customer Facing Service such as “Outbound Voice Call” has to be provisioned in the network as a range of low level services managed by dedicated hardware such as the MSC. These services are defined as Resource Facing Services (and I will be discussing these RFSs in a later blog).
So, we can define a Product Offering as a collection of Customer Facing Services, the Specifications of the Resources required by the Product Offering (and the CFSs) such as the telephone number (MSISDN), type of SIM, type of Handset etc and the Prices to be charged for the Product Offering and the CFSs it offers (Note: An “Outbound Voice Call” or “Send Text Message” can be charged at different rates in different Product Offerings).
I hope you will agree that this sounds sensible, but what exactly is a CFS? Is a “Voice Call” a CFS, or is “Making a Voice Call” a separate CFS from “Receiving a Voice Call”. When one tries to list CFSs it becomes incredibly difficult to actually decide what is and is not a CFS and why.
While working with Belgacom Mobile (Proximus) Eric Borremans and I faced this problem. We needed an objective way of defining what a CFS was and a set of rules to allow us to determine whether a candidate service was a CFS, and if it wasn’t a CFS, then what actually it was.
The trick was to focus back on the definition of CFS, and it comes back to the word “seen” in the definition of CFS, or perhaps more precisely “perceived”. If a End User cannot perceive the difference between two related services, then probably the two services are components of the same CFS. If on the other hand the End User can tell the difference then, probably (as there are other pragmatic criteria to be applied) these two services are separate CFSs.
For example – can an End User tell the difference between making a voice call and receiving one? To me this is a definite “Yes”. The phone rings when a call is made and when answered there is someone on the other end of the line to talk to. On the other hand when making a call the line has to be activated (by picking up the receiver, or pushing a button on the handset), the number dialled and then after hearing the ring tone the phone maybe answered.
On the other hand, can an End User tell the difference between making a voice call to a fixed line number as opposed to a mobile number? In my opinion, these are the same CFS, handled by different RFSs (to do the switching). One could argue that a knowledgeable End User can by knowing something about the numbering plan in the country, but the call is perceived (heard) in the same way during the call. It is also possible that a call to a fixed line number terminates on a mobile phone and vice versa through call forwarding, hunting groups and the like. When it comes to paying for the call the difference between fixed and mobile voice calls may also be perceived as they may be charged for differently, but that is after the event (for Postpay customers at least). So it comes down to perception during the use of the service, not prior or after the event knowledge that counts.
However if one extends this simple rule to a complex service like “Voice Mail” things become complex and uncomfortable. Clearly an End User can perceive the difference between “Listen to a Voice Mail Message” and “Delete a Voice Mail Message”, but then Voice Mail decomposes into about 10 or more CFSs that are never ‘unbundled’ – one could never imagine selling a Product Offering that allowed someone to “Delete a Voice Mail Message” but not to “Listen to a Voice Mail Message”. An additional rule needs to be defined to allow these type of services that are perceived differently to be bundled together into a pragmatic CFS.
Actually Eric Borremans and I came up with 3 rules and a method to apply these rules that allowed Eric to draw up a list of 60 or so CFSs that described every Service that Belgacom Mobile sold and managed. This list has been successfully implemented within Belgacom Mobile in the area of service management and has been used to define all of the Product Offerings they sell.
