NOS and Centili shaping the carrier billing ecosystem

case study

NOS Portugal:

Leading the digital revolution

NOS is a telco and entertainment group based in Portugal, born from the merger of ZON and Optimus, two of the biggest telco companies in the country. NOS is a domestic market leader, with over 4.8 million mobile subscribers, and millions of TV, landline and internet customers. It is also one of the top Portuguese brands, main sponsor of the national football league (called Liga NOS) and many fes-tivals, including the huge, international-ly acclaimed NOS Alive, held in Lisbon. An established leader in digital transfor-mation and customer-centric business approach, NOS is constantly re-evaluat-ing and upgrading their technology and business practices to stay on top of cus-tomer satisfaction in the fast-paced digi-tal environments of today.

CHALLENGE:

Staying on top of the carrier billing opportunity

To stay ahead of the curve in the digital ecosystem, NOS decided to reassess their carrier billing operations. They found their technologies and business processes were no longer ideal to manage the increased complexity brought about by a growing number of merchants and partners that billed their services directly to NOS mobile subscriber’s accounts.

A significant portion of NOS subscribers were billed by third-party merchants for digital goods, with NOS departments having insufficient in-sight into transaction values, their type or frequency. Information wasn’t unified or available in real time. Pieces of it were sourced from third party reports, extract-ed from merchant systems over which NOS had almost no control.

When asked by subscribers when and where an amount was billed to their plan, NOS had to go through considerable internal hassle in order to provide an answer. The hassle could be even greater if a customer query was a complaint. There wasn’t a clear enough overview of opt-ins and opt-outs, subscriptions or service types. Refund was difficult to obtain, if not impossible. Calls to customer service were all treated the same – there was no differentiation between complaints, ques-tions, cancellation requests etc. Both NOS and their subscribers were not able to manage subscriptions and payments.

The workflow associated with carrier billing was scat-tered across many divisions, and therefore hard to com-prehend as whole. In such circumstances, it was difficult for NOS marketing department to change the percep-tion of carrier billing, which was increasingly seen as potentially insecure, by both NOS subscribers and the public. As a result, carrier billing was becoming a source of concern, in spite of the clear revenue opportunity it presented.

The workflow associ-ated with carrier billing was scattered across many divisions, and therefore hard to su-pervise and manage as a whole.

SOLUTION:

cGate telco suite for full visibility and control over DCB

In their conversations with NOS Centili team presented cGate, a fully-featured technical and business package for running, managing and developing carrier billing business within a telecom company. cGate is a collec-tion of tools that draws from Centili’s rich expertise in enabling MNOs and merchants around the world for remote micropayments. It enables MNOs to integrate with app stores such as Google Play, and opens up new space for building both revenue and customer satisfac-tion.

Centili team presented a fully-featured technical and business package for running, managing and developing carrier billing business.

MerchantIntegration

Secure Hosted Payment Pages

Payment Flow Control

Subscription Management

Limits and Blacklisting

Refund Management

Security and Fraud Protection

Monitoring and Alerting

Management Dashboard

ManagementAPI

Google Play Integration

Revenue Calculation

Secure, Branded Payment Pages

According to guidelines determined by NOS and approved by ANACOM, Portugal’s regulator in-charge, Centili has created a custom payment journey, based on Centili-hosted, secure payment pages. Payment confirmation step car-ries NOS brand and follows strict compliance rules. This way, whenever they make a purchase, NOS subscribers are fully informed of the merchant, service, price and that the charge will be added to their mobile phone bill.

Integration into Self-Care App

NOS has given their customers the ability to see their DCB transactions and subscriptions in the self-care app. This was enabled via Centili API. Furthermore, NOS cus-tomers can subscribe to services, unsubscribe, or black-list content from within the self-care app.

Subscription Management

With full control over the subscription lifecycle, NOS re-gained control over the opt-in process, SMS MT messages that accompany each subscription and renewal, renewal triggers, retry schemes and many more. Fully-featured subscription engine is an integral part of cGate.

Read Terms and ConditionsSupport: global@dcbhelp.com

Gaming Merchant | Gaming Service

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Merchant Name Service Name

Action button

Compliance links

Price Interval(for subscriptions only)

Instructions

Input field

Cancel button

Close button More info buttonLogo

HOSTED PAYMENT PAGE

Cancel

Limits Management

Each customer has default expenditure limits configured per day and month. Additionally, limits can be set on the number of opt-ins or number of services a customer is subscribed to. Those can be configured per phone num-ber, per service, per merchant, and configured to apply on a daily, weekly or monthly timeframe. Additionally, lim-its can be customized for each of NOS subscribers sep-arately, which enables higher spending with customers who are gaming enthusiasts, for example.

Consultancy

Centili team proactively shares insights and market trends with NOS, providing guidance and consultancy. Centili business development team, experienced in in-ternational projects, is an asset at disposal to NOS, and actively shapes the partnership.

Customer Care

NOS customer care team uses Centili Dashboard to look up transactions, subscribers, subscriptions and custom-er journey details. It is easy to track down all events, and quickly provide clear information to customers. They are able to trigger actions like opt-out, blacklist and refund, without delay and resolve customer complaints imme-diately. This enables first-class customer experience when interacting with NOS customer care team.

Reporting & Analytics

With cGate, NOS has all DCB-related information in one place. This makes it easy to create automated or custom reports for different stakeholders: finance, support, busi-ness, customer care. And with an easy access to Dash-

board, stakeholders can log in and get analytics of the data of their interest. With a clear dashboard interface, an easy way to track carrier billing transactions was in-troduced.

Service Monitoring

When services are launched, Centili provides 24/7 moni-toring and alerting. KPIs like opt-in rate, opt-out rate, churn rate, number of identifications per hour, are all monitored. If anything is out of place, an automatic alerting will bring the issue to the immediate attention of Centili Support.

Service Approval Process Definition

In discussion with NOS payment manager, Centili de-veloped a standardized and streamlined 4-step Service Approval Process. It was made clear and obligatory for all the parties (merchant, aggregator, integrator and the operator) to provide information of significance aiming to reach the decision quickly. As an integrator, Centili navigates the merchant through the process and even does preapproval, before any tasks reach the operator. A NOS-branded Service Approval Form was created with the aim to communicate the information in a stan-dardized form.

Business Guidelines Definition

After reaching the decision on the rules and guidelines which merchants should obey if they want to work with NOS, all of this information was put into a clear and easy-to understand document, branded in NOS design style guide. Created by Centili design team, Business Guidelines are an obligatory attachment to merchant contracts.

Partner Onboarding and Integration

ServiceApproval

Finance and Billing Management

Consultancy and Development

Second Line Support End User Support

Customizations and Growth

Because of the vast possibilities gained with cGate plat-form, NOS team is inspired to get their business growing. Centili supports their innovative use cases by constantly implementing new features to the platform on request. Also, improvement of user experience in the Dashboard is an integral part of the quarterly development plans.

RESULTS:

Improved visibility and manageability of carrier billing

The implementation of cGate enabled NOS to establish and manage a more transparent carrier billing ecosystem, better suited to their demands in customer centricity and subscriber satisfaction.

2000+NOS employees access cGate dashboard every day

10+ safety mechanisms currently active over cGate

Google Play full compliance

“We now have much better visibili-ty into how to control our products, which in turn increases and enhanc-es our decisions on how to upgrade them. We can now see and monitor our services, and that suits us to the extent that we are thinking of ex-panding DCB as a billing method for some other NOS services.”

Andreia EstrelaNOS

Total visibility and clarity With cGate NOS got a systematic, thorough visi-bility into all the aspects of their carrier billing op-erations. Renewals, opt-in and opt-out transactions are now all transparent and easy to understand. With this came the ability to approve more ser-vices and to expand partnerships.

SafetyWith direct carrier billing conducted in a fully controlled and transparent man-ner, NOS subscribers are much better protected than before. Self-care plat-form enables them to track their spend-ing and transactions. Fully satisfied sub-scribers, who feel and know that they are being looked after, are essential to NOS vision and mission. 

FlexibilityBecause they were able to tailor cGate platform to their own needs and require-ments, (and not vice-versa) NOS was able to launch solutions and processes that multiplied positive outcomes in their car-rier billing business.

Service management capabilityThe abilitiy to assign different roles - manager, customer support engineer, finance etc. - was introduced. Enabling customer support and field and shop workers to directly manage subscrip-tions and refunds was a big step in terms of ef-ficiency and customer care. Also, NOS can now limit services that seem suspicious, and try new services on a limited number of opt-ins, without im-pacting the database or renewals on their platform.

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