Pre-study on Customer Care, Accounting, Charging, Billing, and Pricing

Electronic Commerce platforms offer an opportunity for businesses and challenges for research. As closed markets do require generic transport services only, open Electronic Commerce marketplaces need to deal with the delivery of advanced electronic services due to intense trends to value added information services. After having deployed proprietary platforms, solutions with global access networks commenced due to the commercialization of the Internet. However, today the global electronic marketplace based on integrated services networks is envisioned , since the essential worldwide interconnection of residential customers and businesses at the same time can be provided by the integrated services Internet. It has been observed within this pre-study that closed platforms show a matured state with proprietary products, applications, and tools, sometimes offering semi-open interfaces allowing for the integration with additional system components, but lacking open semantics. However, regionally and logically restricted approaches, such as Swiss Videotex, German Btx, or French Minitel, are going to be replaced by open Electronic Commerce platforms. These open and public solutions start to flourish, mainly driven by the globally accessible Internet. Profound research to obtain an efficient and service integrated platform supporting advanced services is still required. The information society bears a stringent need for advanced communication services and content. Although solutions for methods of charging and accounting single service class networks, such as the telephone network or Virtual Private Networks, exist and are applied successfully, Integrated Services Networks require a completely different approach. Charging and accounting for integrated services remain unsolved problems at the time being which is due to a huge variety of service characterizations by Quality-of-Service, advanced networking technologies , such as ATM, and a dramatically emerging integrated services Internet. In addition, new telecommunication services impose another degree of complexity to existing billing systems, including the demand to bill for content. This determines the need to integrate concepts for interoperable and standardized billing solutions between providers for inter-operator agreements which may include content and transport services. A particular problem area arises with electronic payments for transport services, determining the clear necessity of pico-or micro-payments. As existing traditional and electronic payment systems are not well suited for this task, solutions have to be researched, including cryptographic protocols for secure transmission of payments. Due to the highly competitive telecommunication service provider market, dynamic pricing schemes for integrated multiservice networks are required as well. Today, customer care demands for an open, automated, and agent-based electronic market solution, …