In a special for xchange, contributing editor for Billing & OSS World in Europe, Alex Leslie, sat down with BT Group billing manager Jonathan Jensen and Virgin Mobile head of billing, Stuart Madeley, for a talk about the recession, life and the prospects for the communications industry. Here is an excerpt from their conversation.
B/OSS Europe: Let’s start with an obvious question. What impact do you think the recession will have on our industry?
JJ: There is no doubt that things will slow down. I suppose that there has been a constant pressure to cut costs for the last few years which has intensified. But I also think that in a recession people tend to use communications more. People need to talk, businesses fall back on telecommunications to do business, as travel and conferences and so on are cut back. So I think that communications is reasonably recession proof and that telecoms usage will hold up.
B/OSS Europe: What about convergence? Are we still converging in this recession? In the last one we seemed to stop for a while.
SM: I can see the need for convergence increasing. The significance of bundled products is likely to increase as customers look to save money by switching to a single provider for multiple services, such as TV, broadband, phone and mobile. This gives service providers a chance to protect or even grow revenue, by selling larger product bundles to more customers. A slimmer margin means it’s even more important to manage the customer through a single view across all products.
To read more of this conversation, click here or on the source link below.