METHOD FOR PREPARING AN OPTIMAL ALTERNATIVE BILLING PLAN FOR MOBILE TELEPHONY USERS MANAGED THROUGH A CALL CENTER

• US 20120143735A1
• Filed: 12/02/2010
• Published: 06/07/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 12/02/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Telefonica SA
• Original Assignee: Telefonica SA
• Inventors: PASCAL LEO, Juan Moises, FRIAS MARTINEZ, Enrique
• Granted Patent: US 8,738,482 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/34
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/04 Billing or invoicing
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 15/43 Billing software details
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 15/51 for resellers, retailers or service providers
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 15/58 based on statistics of usage or network monitoring
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 15/80 Rating or billing plans; Tariff determination aspects
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/24 Accounting or billing

Abstract

The invention relates to a method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan for mobile telephony users managed through a call center, which is applicable to the recommendation of an optimal telephony plan to the customers of an operator, considering the consumption of the customer, the risk of the customer migrating to another and the market strategy of the operator. It comprises the estimation of the real bill of a customer during a time period covering the last M months, a simulated estimation of the bill of the customer using any generic plan based on the mean traffic of the last M months, applying a simulation algorithm and the estimation of the churn risk of a customer according to the value of the said customer, the value of the operators on the market, number of better offers, number of the customers which he calls per operator and the simulations performed with the generic plans, applying an estimation algorithm.

Claims

1. A method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan for mobile telephony operators managed through a call center, based on the processing by at least one first service server of information relating to the billing of different telecommunication services in which said user/customer has been involved, including duration and time slot of use, during a determined period preceding a determined moment of application of the method, comprising the following stages:

(a) estimation of the real bill of a customer during a selected predetermined time period covering the last M months, by processing the accumulated mean traffic, extrapolated to said last M months, obtaining the mean consumption of said customer in said selected period;

(b) simulated estimation of the bill of said customer using any generic plan based on the mean traffic of the last M months, applying a simulation algorithm;

(c) estimation of the churn risk of a customer according to the value of the said customer, the value of the operators on the market, number of better offers, number of the customers which he calls per operator, and the simulations performed with the generic plans, applying a churn risk algorithm; and

(d) selection of an alternative plan and presentation to the customer of said new plan in the form of a recommendation,

wherein said estimation of stages (a) and (b) and said calculation of the chum risk of stage (c) are performed by computer means processing the data supplied by said first server, and wherein said operator selectively offers to said user the mentioned alternative billing plan.

2. The method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan according to claim 1, wherein the mean consumption of the selected period (M months), of said stage (a) is acquired considering the following dimensions:

consumption scenario;

different possibilities of destinations of calls that a customer can make, dependent on the regulatory framework, from a group comprising local calls, national calls, calls to other mobiles, incoming calls or outgoing calls;

day of the week;

differences of use dependent on the day of the week;

time slot;

the consumptions of the customer are stored according to several time slots considered.

3. The method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan according to claim 1, wherein in stage (b) the value of the bill of the customer during the selected period of M months is first calculated applying the current billing plan at the time of performing the estimation, and the estimation applying other plans will be performed according to whether or not there is a deviation of ±

5% from the real billing with respect to the simulated one in each month.

7. The method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan according to claim 1, wherein the data for the estimation of said stage (b) comprise a piece of information which details the aggregation of consumption information for other plans and which comprises the evaluation of numbers susceptible of being added as “

frequent”

numbers, “

time slots of greatest use” and

contracted “

service packages”

.

8. The method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan according to claim 1, wherein the estimation algorithm comprises the accumulated traffic information of each of the customers, is distributed over a three-dimensional matrix which considers the dimensions of call destination/day of the week and time slot for each offer associated with a customer.

9. The method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan according to claim 8, wherein there is introduced in said three-dimensional matrix a correction according to the packages contracted (amount of minutes or money units which have already been paid in the monthly fee) by a determined customer according to the selected destinations or SDs.

10. The method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan according to claim 9, wherein the package is distributed percentage-wise among the SDs using a correction factor according to the following formula:

11. The method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan according to claim 1, wherein the risk function assigned to a subscriber is given by the following parameters:

Customer Value;

Value expressed per unit which indicates for each value segment, defined by the operator, an importance value (VC) is assigned;

Delta Function (DELTA);

Range of difference in % which indicates the difference between the current offer of the subscriber and any of the simulated ones, the importance value will be assigned according to said percentage, i.e., the greater the difference, the higher the imputed value;

Better Offers (OF);

Value assigned to the number of offers better than the current one after having performed the simulation, and which takes from 0 convenient plans (none) to N convenient plans;

Frequent Operator (NF);

Value assigned to the operator most called by the subscriber and which will correspond with the value 100 and 0 for the rest;

Number of Best Plan Operators (OP);

Value assigned to the Number of Operators with which the customer may have had better offers, the minimum value being 1 and the maximum value (the Number of operators which operate in the analysis framework); and

Operator Value (VLOP);

A value between 0 and 100 is assigned, 100 being the maximum value, according to the importance on the operations market, creating a risk function f with said parameters

ƒ

(Ci)=VC*(DELTA+OF+NF+GP+VLOP)

which measures the risk of the subscriber in the defined and executed framework.

12. The method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan according to claim 11, wherein once the risk function for a customer has been calculated from this value, the risk level is calculated, five risk levels being used:

(1) very low, (2) low, (3) medium, (4) high and (5) very high, defined as ranges of the values of the risk function and the maximum obtained for each of the simulations is selected.

4. A method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan, wherein the estimation of the churn risk of a determined customer comprises an algorithm operating a programmable risk function formed by the following variables:

number of plans which reduce the cost with respect to the current plan, number of operators which have better plans, customer value and operator to which the customer makes the most calls, said risk function is expressed with a result in the form of a score per customer, wherein the higher the value, the greater the perception of the calculated risk.

5. A method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan, wherein the data for estimating the real bill of a customer in said stage (a) comprise a first piece of information about the bills in the form of structured data including customer number, telephone number, month and year of analysis and bill charged in said month and year and a second piece of information in the form of structured data relating to the current offer of the customer, including, in addition to said identifying data (customer number, telephone number) a code indicating the contracted offer at the time of performing the estimation, as well as a detail of all the additional services contracted by the customer in the estimation period.

6. The method for preparing an optimal alternative billing plan according to claim 5, wherein to perform the estimation of the stage (a) the following fields are additionally taken into account:

1.—

consumption scenario;

2.—

day of the week;

d.—

time slot;

e.—

indicator of frequent numbers.