Flexible charging enables leo Namibia to launch services in days, not months

As a late entrant in a competitive market, leo needs to offer exciting services in a range of highly attractive packages to win customers from established rivals. Flexible charging is the key, and the company wanted to roll out a new system as fast as possible.

“I think one of the key advantages of working with Nokia Siemens Networks is that they provide you with complete solutions.”
 

Soban Pasha, CEO of leo Namibia

leo is the brand now used by Orascom group companies across Africa. As a late entrant in the Namibian market, leo knew it had to work hard to win over subscribers using the latest services and flexible tariffs. But the company’s existing charging system made it difficult and time consuming to launch each new offer.

“If you’re operating in a very competitive market, you need to be able to offer flexible solutions because customers become a lot more demanding in a very high penetration market. Price is a critical element of our marketing mix, especially at this point in time. We should be able to offer some very interesting tariff plans and price plans,” says Soban Pasha, CEO of leo Namibia.

The company already had a good relationship with Nokia Siemens Networks as its main network and solutions supplier. Migrating subscribers to a new charging regime in a live network is a major project, but the strong partnership between the two companies gave leo confidence that Nokia Siemens Networks could offer the high level of support needed to prevent service disruptions.

Challenges

  • leo’s existing charging system meant it took too long to launch innovative services for prepaid customers
  • It also limited the provider’s ability to tempt prepaid customers with discounts and other special offers
  • Migrating to an improved system on a live network risked disrupting existing services

Accelerating the business
The solution was to migrate to the latest releases of the Nokia Siemens Networks charge@once select and charge@once mediate systems, which provide end-to-end charging and billing flexibility for prepaid customers using a single platform. This integrated solution has more than halved the time taken for leo to launch new offers onto the market. Instead of several months conventionally taken, new services can be brought to market in about two weeks.

Solutions

  • Nokia Siemens Networks helped leo migrate its subscribers to the charge@once prepaid charging and mediation solution
  • Comprehensive support from consultants and systems integration specialists ensured a smooth and speedy transition

charge@once select 1.6 is unique in offering communications service providers (CSP) a comprehensive selection of more than 100 ready-to-use Marketing Use Cases (MUC). These can be configured in the Offer Manager tool, making it easy to build a huge number of different marketing campaigns. charge@once select offers charging and rating functionality for all types of networks, prepaid customers and services, including voice, data, messaging, downloads, instant communications and so on.

charge@once mediate 3.0 offers convergent mediation for both online and offline charging information in one solution. It brings together data from all the network elements and other systems and converts it into a common format to enable accurate charging and billing.

Benefits

  • The ready-to-use marketing use cases in charge@once cut the time taken to launch new services from months to an average of two weeks
  • Marketing campaigns can be tailored in an agile and responsive way
  • Nokia Siemens Networks familiarity with leo’s network and systems supported a smooth implementation that took just five months.

Strong support vital for success
But the successful delivery of such a major project in a live network demanded more than just good products. Nokia Siemens Networks brought in the expertise of its Business Solutions organization to deliver the project in just five months. “One of the highlights was the speed at which the project was rolled out. There aren’t too many occasions I’ve come across in my career where you see a vendor committing to a time-frame and actually fulfilling and coming up to expectations. I think Nokia Siemens Networks achieved that,” says Mr. Pasha

leo Namibia now enjoys the latest prepaid technology for all services charging, and the possibility of introducing innovative new marketing campaigns fast, like bonuses and loyalty programs and multiple accounts.

Nokia Siemens Networks currently has 28 charge@once select and 80 charge@once mediate customers.