Technology Showcase Featuring CSG Ascendon and CSG Bill Explainer
Oh. Welcome, everyone, and thank you again for coming to this, this program this afternoon. Again, I'd like to thank CSG for sponsoring it and pulling this venue together and pulling all of us together. I presume several of you were at the earlier panels where we talked fundamentally about where our new growth opportunities for the industry. How does this impact our customer experience, our processes, our thinking and our software? And then we looked into some of the, the practical issues in the second panel of how do we implement it, what's blocking us from succeeding? How do we need to think differently? And there were some, some very interesting, approaches put out.
There was a concrete agreement that most of the incremental revenue was going to come from B2B and was going to come from vertical industries that we're going to be, you know, quite different from telecom. Where we were going to need to focus on the end-to-end healthcare, for example, and or at there were some really interesting examples with, managing F1 racing teams and boat racing teams. And what it really underscored is that the systems that were put in place for basic consumer telecommunications were going to be suboptimal if we want to grow the next hundred billion in revenue as an industry. Which, by the way, my firm Appledore Research, we've actually quantified $100 billion, and we know that there is more incremental revenue to be found. So this is not idle money. This is not idle markets.
The third part of the program is the technology showcase. The technology showcase and the actual demonstrations with the ability for you to see interaction with software systems that will bring some of these capabilities that we need to grow our businesses to you and I would like to introduce the first presenter, Maryellen Knauff, Solution Engineer with CSG. And I want to emphasize that both Maryellen and the follow up presenter, Bela are going to be available afterward. If you want to have any Q&A with them or even see the, the demos up, up, close and personal. Thank you very much and welcome.
Thank you. Welcome to the Attention Economy. Attention is the new currency and everyone wants them. What used to be the domain of just broadcasters is now a battleground of established and new entrants scrambling for the most precious resource, our attention and time. Mobile operators of today are turning to CSG to put their customers at the center of everything that they do. We elevate the customer experience and bring new business models to market with lightning speed, so you can keep your current customers happy.
And while enabling the latest market offerings to entice the new ones. Now who is CSG? We have helped cable and mobile operators weather technological changes for over 40 years. One thing we've always known from working with our 900 plus clients is customer experience creates a huge long term value. We are the backbone of customer experience, revenue, monetization and payments at companies around the world. Each year, we support our customers in billing over $100 billion in charges, processing over 500 million transactions per day, and over $118 billion in payments annually. We've helped many of the world's most recognized brands solve their toughest challenges quietly and in the background.
Today, I'm here to tell you specifically about Ascendon, CSG’s fully cloud native transformative DBS SaaS solution. It's a modern solution delivered in a true SaaS model, but leveraging decades of experience from our communication services, billing and payments. The platform has been delivering solutions for more than 15 years and is trusted by some of the largest mobile, telco, media and entertainment companies in the world. With our fully cloud native SaaS platform, you reap the benefits of an evergreen solution built on AWS. We provide our customers with quarterly upgrades while the platform is built in a modular fashion, allowing you to turn on or off system components and modules as you need them, and allowing you to see which customers are, growing with you the most. Digital monetization provides adjunct billing capabilities.
So these are sorry, just to take a step back. Don't think it's syncing up right now. Sorry about that. So Ascendon as our cloud based platform enables the service providers to launch, and all these different types of use cases. So. It's not. It's. All right.
So for digital monetization, this is us providing memberships and revenue management for the network. Outside of that we also work in digital marketplaces, allowing cable operators, cell mobile operators to expand their reach by not just selling their services on the network, but also SaaS subscriptions, media entertainment subscriptions along with it. So for mobile and broadband, we we provide real time reading and charging and cloud CCS. And then finally we enable MVNO and MVNE operators. So the latest problem we've solved is the new digital customer. The old monetization models are slowly fading.
So we created Ascendon and took everything we knew about the past and brought together everything we've learned about the present and the future. The convergence of traditional connectivity services and digital content services requires a different view of the customer. So you need to go no go beyond just knowing who your customer is, their phone number, and what plan they're on. You need to know what device they're using, what they're entitled to consume and do with their plan. You need to support modern identity, wallet access and be able to process payments with every option out there in the market. You also need to have a catalog that can handle massive content and metadata, while also supporting preorders for the latest smartphone in every model, color and size.
You need to have a federated and flexible wallet, enabling the customers to leverage all the new and interesting ways to pay, as well as support the traditional payment methods that are out there. And if you happen to own the network that all these assets are riding on, you need all the latest bells and whistles to protect it. So building upon our earlier discussion of the digital customer model will now turn our attention to the groundbreaking capabilities of AI and analyzing customer data.
With Ascendon, we process real time reading and charging data and processing transactions. The data records and generating invoices creates a treasure trove of data for a generative AI to draw upon. Up to 50% of inbound calls to mobile operator call centers are related to billing questions. So what CSG has built is an AI model that increases customer satisfaction by 45%, and decreases calls into the call center by 20%. Well, you're about to see in a video demo is our new generative AI chat bot for Ascendon. A
chat bot focused on reducing customer churn by spotting opportunities for customers to switch to a better data plan according to their specific usage over the last three months. It starts with usage data. As a full service, end-to-end billing platform, Ascendon supports both online real time reading and charging and offline data record ingestion. To increase customer retention rates, reduce churn, and decrease the number of customers calling in with data overage and billing questions, the new Ascendon AI feature is leveraging usage data in a whole new way. Usage and billing data for a three month period is analyzed, and a determination is made whether the customer over or under utilized their mobile data plan.
Behind the scenes, a churn engine scores customers based on their likelihood of leaving the mobile service and generates a recommendation. The recommended mobile plan is then presented both to the customer and customer care agents with an explanation. Customers will be proactively notified via their email with a message generated by the AI engine explaining their personal recommendation and giving them an option to click a link to learn more about their suggested plan.
The AI is generating three types of emails downgrade, upgrade, and no change in incorporating a link to this platform where users can view the new data plan if appropriate. In the self care portal, the customer see the detailed explanation of their personalized smart recommendation. The generated text provides background information on past data usage and informs the customer of the price and entitlements of their recommended plan. Customers can upgrade themselves by clicking this button and pay the pro-rated amount to switch plans during billing cycles.
If a customer happens to get cold feet, not a problem. They can click cancel and they're taken back to the main menu of self care. If they have more questions, they can use our AI chat bot. I will go ahead and ask the bot when will my new plan start? Customers may ask how much money they can save, their usage patterns over the last three months or when their new plan will go into effect. The chat bot provides in-depth responses and is specific to this subscriber for their current billing cycle. Internally, the call center employees can also see the Smart recommendations.
The recommendation text has been regenerated to fit the care agent's perspective and provide them the same insight the customer is seeing. The chat bot capabilities extend to your employees, too. A care agent can ask the chat bot, “how much data will the recommended plan provide?” They quickly answer any customer inquiries that come in. With the new generative AI features in Ascendon, mobile operators improve the customer experience, decrease costs and call centers, and create a stickier relationship with customers.
So that was a video of our AI demo. We're going to also be showing it more later over there. And then I wanted to just wrap up with a few slides telling you about current Ascendon customers and the use cases that we've been able to solve for them. The first one here is Maxis, their communication service provider in Malaysia and one of the oldest and largest telecom companies out of Kuala Lumpur.
They provide a variety of communication products, applications and added services for their customers. That includes regular consumers, large enterprises and SMB. They wish to have an OTT marketplace model that could present third party offers, all in a singular catalog. So they have one catalog for everyone. So whether it's a global player like Netflix or iFlix or the local OTT providers providing local content, users can see every single title that's available in a single catalog on their mobile device. CSG’s Ascendon solution was selected as the platform of choice.
What Ascendon was able to do was bring in a professional services team from our Ascendon business unit that worked to build an all in one digital catalog to third party services and internal product catalogs, into a single presentation. On top of that product catalog, Ascendon also provides customer experiences, shopping cart functionalities, and self-care features. Ascendon presents the offers to customers.
Bundles, pricing plans are also made available and created in Ascendon, and then the result is a mobile and browser experience built by CSG that provides the customer an easy way to choose a plan, pay for it, and then they can also add on partners such as Netflix, Iflix, Vue and Mubi all within a single experience. Comcast Xfinity, one of the largest cable operators in the world, has faced a challenge in the past where they wanted to know how do you retain the children of some of your most loyal customers when they're moving out of the house and going off to school? When they're going off to college how do you battle with Netflix and YouTube to keep these kids, who have been using your product at home and make them, buyers of the system when they have jobs after school? So what Ascendon helped them launch was a program called Xfinity on Campus at over 100 universities. This is a groundbreaking wholesale model with a direct to consumer overlay, a federated identity between the students user ID at school and the Comcast system that offered free live linear your TV channels to them and then a simple profile. Any needs students with a credit card on file could add on their own premium content streaming services, purchase titles. And that experience gave them a better chance of retaining, retaining Comcast for their own services once they were to graduate and move on after school. So another use case here is email.
This one again was with Comcast. And what they wanted to do is partner with the sign in to support Xumo TV. So this is a business model that combines Comcast’s live linear TV with third party OTT services.
What they were able to do is expand their market reach across the US. This model leverages technology from a hardware manufacturers, so there's a physical box, to create a direct to consumer service that integrates live TV with streaming apps like Netflix and HBO. This approach allows Comcast to acquire customers both within and outside their traditional markets, and Ascendon’s Platform helps manage the single account for all these users. So we ensure that there's a seamless integration. They have entitlement management across all the various streaming services, and this addresses the evolving content consumption and habits. Basically, what it enables customers, to experience is the Comcast system, whether they live in the traditional footprint or not.
And then finally, this is an example from Bell Media, traditional operator in Canada who wanted to go toe to toe with Netflix. They asked us to help with a launch them, help them launch an app called Crave. They went all in with 67 providers, delivered over 11 different types of consumer devices. And they also included the ability to download titles for enjoyment during travel. So not only did we support the traditional online payment methods, we allowed Bell customers to go ahead and just add titles to their existing bill, or push those charges to their monthly invoice. So to wrap it up, we've been leveraging AI.
We're committed to delivering frictionless customer experiences with it and elevating your current and future business models with the Ascendon intelligent subscription management platform. Thank you. Well, I want to thank Maryellen for coming up and giving us a a view of some of the capabilities in the systems.
I think a couple of things bringing you back to the opportunities that we saw earlier is it was very clearly a system that could, first of all, handle a broader range of service and business model types, like some of those business models were not something you directly sell, but like an affinity sale. And so the idea of connecting multiple services and multiple relationships to one customer, the customer experience is being implemented in, in modern systems. The second thing is I find it interesting being, you know, very much emphasized that it's AWS cloud, implemented and delivered gives you the chance to scale things up and down so that this idea of managing cost as you're innovating in new areas or augmenting other systems is very practical. So we're going to take like a three minute break in between the two. So if you want to get up, stand up, stretch out.
And then we are going to bring up our second presenter and a second demonstration. And again, I want to thank CSG for pulling together this, this program this afternoon. This is going to be the second presentation and demo, in the technology showcase. And this demo is quite interesting because one of the things we talked about earlier is how even when networks may have similar performance, there's been some clear evidence of customers preferring the network where they had the better experience with customer service and with getting answers easily and just having very good consumer relationship.
And probably one of the most confusing parts of, of any relationship is understanding complex bills and billing changes. The next the next product uses AI, got to have the AI word in there, but uses AI in a very useful way. It's using AI to analyze bills to help a customer service agent be able to make a much better explanation of why a bill is what it is and why a bill is changed. So I want to, welcome, Bela Toth, Senior Solutions Consultant from CSG, to talk about Bill Explainer, and one other thing I asked him for something cool about it and we we talked a little bit back and forth.
And what's very interesting is if you want to incrementally add this capability, regardless of whose billing system you're running, this can be added on to give you AI driven insights and give a better customer experience. So to me, that seems to hit all of the topics that the earlier panel talked about. Bela. Hello folks. Thanks everyone that stayed around.
I know it's towards the end of the day, but, we'll get through this and I'm going to first start with the video on introducing everyone to what Bill Explainer actually is. After the video, we're going to talk about why our customers came to us, asking us for help, how we took a look at the industry, understanding what was going on. And then, of course, why did we go down the approach of creating Bill Explainer the way we did? So a couple of minutes on the video. Saying goodbye to customer bill shock with CSG Bill Explainer a solution designed to eliminate consumer confusion and reduce call center volumes through AI driven bill explanation. Today, 1 in 4 consumers experience bill shock, causing confusion and driving up billing related calls to the contact center. The result is lost revenue and millions spent on operational expenses annually.
CSG Bill Explainer leverages our 40 plus years of billing and innovation expertise, and now the power of generative AI to make these challenges a thing of the past by helping consumers understand the why behind the changes and charges and fees. Increase bill comprehension, like explaining bill changes through an individualized microsite that eliminates logging challenges while driving digital adoption. Automated anomaly identification transforms complex billing data into intuitive information, ultimately reducing operational costs. Guide your consumers through their bill with AI generated, personalized explanations providing more contextual insights while reducing the need to create hand-built rule sets. Bill Explainer itemized charges for clear explanation of overall amount due. Specifically calling out month to month charges to proactively improve bill comprehension, ultimately deflecting billing related calls to the contact center.
Bill Explainers, proactive notifications, care journeys, and payment gateways allows you to take your billing experience beyond just the transactional. Best of all, not only will Bill Explainer make billing less confusing for your customer, it will automate billing operations with generative AI, speeding up bill preparation time, and you can do it all without risk or ripping and replace existing systems. Bill Explainer fits into your current tech stack securely with go live in as little as 120 days. Billing doesn't have to have so many variants.
When your customers have questions, Bill Explainer has the answers. CSG Bill Explainer. I'm going to start by saying Dan in the last session mentioned a really great sentence. He said, once our customers called us, we failed. And that's really what the industry is about today, self-service, and that's what Bill Explainer is designed to do. We've created a ability to help deflect calls into the call center and talking to so many customers.
The average cost is about 6 or $7 a call. I've had some customers say it's $20 a call. So the initial reasoning for creating Bill Explainers that our customer said, we have such a hard time answering the phone because of the 50% of calls, 70 some percent of those calls represent confusion as to the bill. Can we just eliminate those so that our agents can manage those calls that really count, other than very simple bill questions? And I know that a lot of you today get your utility bill, you might get a high speed bill, and if the bill goes up, the one thing that they don't do today is answer why? Why does your bill go up? And that's one of the reasons why we created Bill Explainer. So it's a pain to get a bill. I don't want to look at mine.
I'm sure many of you don't want to look at yours, except when it goes up. And then you got to figure out why did my bill go up. So it's a very painful experience.
Not only are you downloading the current bill and your previous bill, you know, if they go line by line to figure out what changed. I'm not worried about the couple of dollars with the taxes, but why did my bill go up? Right? Traditionally, it's going up. If you call in to the call center, they're also going to have the same problem, right? They don't know themselves because they don't know who you are. So they're going to download again the current bill of yours and then the previous bill while you're on hold. Not to mention you probably have a call wait time. So you're waiting to talk to them to tell you why does your bill go up.
So it's not a very great experience when you receive your bill. At CSG our client said, this isn't great. We need a way to change that.
And as we looked at the industry, we realized we need to think differently. We need to change that conversation. And that's why when we went on Bill Explainer, there are several things that we had to have in it. Had to be a great customer experience.
So that's my job. That's what I do at CSG. I deal with all of the customer experience situations, so it has to be easy, not to mention personalized. They need to know who I am. If it's just a generic message saying your bill increase due to XYZ, that's not a great message. But what about why did my bill change Then also using AI in the mix. We need a wonderful way to use AI, but in a way that's very secure.
This is billing, so it can just be anything pulled out of the internet to then be displayed to the customer. So we want to take what's not a great experience and change it into a positive experience. A lot of people say, well, why use CSG? Why your solution? And in the previous session, Maryellen very well mentioned that CSG has been in the billing business for over 40 years. And we know a lot about billings, and we've been in a lot of different billing type of situations. And also we're creating a product where a lot of CSG products are overlays.
We're not ripping out anything. We're not replacing anything. We're filling in the gaps that the current vendors of our clients can't fill in today. The core of Bill Explainer is looking at your current bill and a previous bill scoring line by line, and understanding how each line item changed. And that's a wonderful thing.
The AI portion goes one step further. Let's go look at the major differences of those line by line items, and then create a very easy sentence as far as why did my bill change? So our industry numbers are really great here. As I mentioned, 73% of the billing related calls, the calls have been coded off as I'm confused about my bill. 73% are about why did it go up? Also, we're seeing that about 67% of consumers, they don't want to talk to an agent. I know I don't.
And also when I call, I don't want to have to wait either. They want to utilize whatever digital channel is readily available for them to do that. And it could be a chat, it could be an SMS, it could be an email. And of course, making a bill personalize, you have to realize that based on the services out there, there are could be potentially 1500 plus different scenarios.
So we need to ensure that when we are helping our customers with their experience of why do my bill change, it must be personalized. They need to know that, hey, this this provider knows who I am. So here's our Bill Explainer. There's really two pages to it. And the first page that you're going to see on the left in the blue is saying, hi, Paul.
It's going to say that Paul, your bill is higher this month and here's why. And that's the one thing I challenge everyone in the room to look at your next bill that you receive through an email. Why did your bill go up and did they tell you why, other than the fact that it went up? So can say that in this situation, the discount that they had, the promo rolled off, not to mention that there were roaming charges, right, while traveling, additional TV receiver and an overage by Avery.
So making it personalized, we know exactly who in your family actually went over on their allotment, their entitlement in a particular way. And this is our AI statement, right? We have taken a look at all of those line items. We understood what's the big drivers of why your bill changed. And then we created the sentence so that your first look at this bill saying, oh, now I know why my bill went up, and then what's the next step, right? Now, if there are people that still don't understand, they can call into the call center and the agent's going to also handle the call. They too can have access to Bill Explainer because an agent also doesn't want to have to put the customer on hold. Download the current and their previous, and do their line by line comparison.
We're going to make this available to the agent also, so that they can help the customer in a more real time fashion and answer their questions right away without having to put them on hold on the right hand side and that image, you're going to see what changed. And this is the power Bill Explainer score. On the right hand side is your current bill.
On the left hand side is going to be their last bill or the previous bill. Line by line they can scroll down and understand how each line item changed. That's something that I know I don't like to do. Now. What you also notice in this example here is that there is no PII information. One of the things we wanted ensure that the customer can do their experience, that when they receive that notification, whether it's an SMS or whether it's an email, they can open it without having to type in any credentials.
The fact that there's no PII, right, they can go ahead and open Bill Explainer without having to type in a username or a password. And CSG does utilize Json web technology, right? Private keys and public keys to encrypt the information until the customer then receives it, taps on it, and opens this up. This is the microsite that we've been talking about. These are the colors that CSG chose to use for our demo, but for our clients, this is simply an extension of their brand. All of these items are customizable to their logo, to their colors, to their fonts, and to the way they displayed the information.
So in a core, what happens? We tap into the information once the cycle has occurred from the biller. Once that billing information is have been transformed into the statement format, that's where we tap it right before it goes to the customer. At the time that the bill explained URLs delivered to the customer, then the information is ready to go on. Whenever the customer decides to go back to that email or that URL on, tap on the link in real time.
We create the microsite right? So we detect there's a change. We send a notification, the customer clicks on the link, and right away we in real time pull the information down, reach out to gen AI to create the statement, display that microsite to the customer, then help resolve the issue that they're having currently. Two additional things that we have in there is ability to pay.
So we created a redirect which currently that once they understand why the bill changed, they can click on that pay now button, which will take them to wherever a client wants them to go to authenticate and then pay their bill. We realized quite early on that the biggest barrier to paying the bill is understanding why changed. So once they understand why it changed, give them that ability from right then and there to go ahead and make that payment. And our clients have detected an earlier payment on the system once Bill Explainer was implemented. So a little bit more about the generative AI.
We are using it in three places currently in Bill Explainer number one that you saw earlier was that gen AI statement which explained why the bill went up? So it pulled those major items out of the comparison, created this statement. The second one is what you're going to see right here. This is our admin module. So there is ability in Bill Explainer to create additional explanations for the line items or the line item sections or categories. When we go to our bills today, it's very quick and very to the point, but sometimes it's not enough explanation. So in the Bill Explainer admin that our clients have access to, they can put in additional content, additional information to help explain a particular line item charge.
Why was I charge this item on, a measurable type of a service? How was it calculated? So our clients have the ability to create additional descriptions and Bill Explainer to help explain not just the difference, but also how was that line item particularly calculated? Measured, I should say. Then also, we are in a prototype of creating what we call a concierge chat session, where the customer can create a question right into Bill Explainer and ask them about their bill, anything about the bill. For example, if there's a prorate on the bill because they added, let's say Max or, Hulu, they can say what to prorate charge because they noted some different items on their bill for different dates or help explain to me how you created the prorate charge. Those items are available. It's going to be around January, and we're doing the beta testing right now.
So no longer does a customer have to come to CSG saying, hey, I need to make a change. Instead, we give them the tools to do it themselves. It could very well be a bill format change, a font change, a description change, a new item change. It's all in their hands today. So a couple of industry standards that we saw what we wanted to achieve in Bill Explainer, which I was to allow the customer to self-service themselves within 60 seconds. I don't have to wait for a seven minute call center chat.
Instead, we're going to be proactive. We're going to send the link to the customer. They can click on it whenever they want, and then they can go ahead and self-service themselves, but come to a conclusion within 60 seconds, if not less, is to why did my bill change? From there the ability to reduce calls into the call center 17.5% is a great measurement.
We also realize that there's a higher click through payment rate. Once they understood the bill, they're more apt to go ahead and make a payment on what they understood versus not understand why it went up, which would result in a call potentially. So using gen AI to be very personalized on the explanation of why did their bill change, not to mention deflecting the calls into the call center. And even if they got past that deflection, the agents can utilize Bill Explainer to help them convey to the customer why their bill changed.
Then also our 40 years of experience in billing allowed us to create this platform. So when using gen AI, we don't have to go out to the web and pull in information, right? We have enough intelligence at CSG to create that in a very secured environment. We also do not push that information out. So no information is coming in externally, nor are we pushing it externally. Not even goes to ChatGPT to help them with their model.
We're not pushing anything to them at all. It's all very well contained in CSG, so we don't have any issue with, unacceptable language or information getting out. So these stats right here are from one of our clients using Bill Explainer today we have over, half dozen using Bill Explainer.
I believe the oldest one's about 18 to 24 months. This is after one year, as of Q3 2024 their click rate on “Pay Now” is 24%. They're finding a quarter over quarter average of about 4% of an increase, especially when there's a rate event happening, which is typically in the fall.
I've heard some companies might even have two. Then also an improvement on and we call it a click rate on what changed. If you recall earlier, the first page has that gen AI statement. The second page is about what changed. And that's a line by line comparison. So only just 18.58% had to go to that second page.
So essentially is telling us there is a, almost an 80%, if not more containment rate that they just needed to see that first page to understand why their bill changed. And they were fine at that point going forward. They deliver that on average of 51 seconds. So we did meet our goal is 60s or less. So within 51 seconds is an average time spent in Bill Explainer understanding why their bill changed.
And again, these stats are just as of the end of Q3 2024. That’s my presentation for everyone today, if you'd like to stick around later on, Maryellen and I'd be happy to demo any of the solutions that we talked about just earlier. Thank you.
2024-10-27 22:48
