Hi Akshay
In my opinion, there is no requirement that a Product is implemented as a Service with network Resources. A Product can be anything that is sold by the CSP. Consider for example an extended warranty plan for a leased/purchased device. The customer pays for the warranty but there is no trace of this in the network, only in the product inventory and the billing system.
Specifically for autopay, you could certainly model it as a product, and thus use its presence to influence the price, as in your option 1. But perhaps managing this with orders is somewhat cumbersome.
An alternative approach might be to model the autopayment as a sort of commitment term (which really it is, the customer has given a commitment to set up an autopayment). You'd have an extension to ProductOfferingTerm to represent this, and the corresponding instances ProductTerm and OrderTerm.
In either case, please note the following:
- You'll need to handle the situation where the customer stops the autopayment, somehow you'll have to detect that and cause an order to happen to change the pricing.
- The Open API model does not currently surface pricing rules, neither at catalog authoring time nor at runtime charge/price calculation.
Hope it helps
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Jonathan Goldberg
Amdocs Management Limited
Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
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Original Message:
Sent: Mar 16, 2021 12:03
From: Akshay Hiremath
Subject: what is the best way to model Autopay in the prepaid
Hi,
Autopay (to enroll your payment method for monthly recurring payments) is a feature offered by marketing to the customer. Why I am using a feature because this is not a service that telco is providing. The business requirement is to give a promotional bonus if a customer chooses to opt for Autopay.
Now the dilemma is how exactly should this be modeled,
1. Should it be modeled as an independent Production specification and then associated with the selected Offerings in the Catalog?
Side effects of this approach are :
a. To support this Product Spec, this doesn't really have any Information model service or resource behind it.
b. for each Autopay enrollment or modification we need to create an order to provision it.
2. If Autopay is not considered a product then how can we invoke catalog/promotion engine procedures/logic to provide promotional benefit for items outside the Catalog?
#CustomerExperience
#General
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Akshay Hiremath
Rogers Communications Inc.
All views are personal and don't represent my employer
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