One of my favorite oxymorons is the computerized, paperless office. A brief glance at
my desk on a daily basis confirms how ridiculous this prediction turned out to be. Being
in the publishing industry, of course means that aside from the paper we create
internally, we also receive a slew of press kits from the companies that you read about in
these pages. Press kits come in a variety of forms, the most common being very heavy,
glossy, and taking up mountains of space.
So whenever possible, I ask that information be sent to me through e-mail. At least I
can always search e-mail by keywords when needed, making it easy to find what I am looking
for. I store so much paper at work that when I get home, the last thing I want to be
confronted with is even more paper. As my travel schedule is quite hectic, it can take me
many weeks to get to my mail and as such, I have to scramble to get my bills paid before I
get charged late fees. In fact, a future goal is to replace my monthly paper bills with
electronic versions, perhaps e-mailed to me. But I am still living in the present and as
such have to deal with my dreaded monthly bills, 12 times a year.
For those of you who read my One Less Wire column online
at TMCnet.com, you know that I subscribed to a cable modem service about four months ago,
which is supplied by my cable company, Cablevision, who resells service from @home.
Recently one weekend, I was in a rush to pay my bills and to my surprise Cablevision had
sent me two bills with the same billing period. I called Cablevision and asked why I was
faced with two bills instead of one. They told me that one bill was for my cable modem and
the other was for my usual service. Being the hater of extraneous paper that I am, I asked
if I could have my bills combined into a single one, to which they replied,
No. I then asked if I could pay for both invoices with a single check. Again,
the response was an unequivocal, No. I was pretty horrified to find out that
the same company couldnt bill me for my various services with a single bill. Who
needs more paper in their life? I then asked if I was the only person that had this
concern. You guessed it! Once again, the reply was Negative.
Needless to say, this was not a strong relationship building experience between
Cablevision and myself. If all service providers, especially the new breed of Integrated
Communications Provider (ICP) run their businesses like this, customers are going to be
pretty annoyed. ICPs should have the flexibility to allow their billing system to be
tailored to meet the needs of their customers. Some customers (such as myself) want one
bill, and yet others might want multiple bills, perhaps so they could submit one to their
place of work. As competition heats up, service providers need to make sure their billing
systems are sophisticated enough to handle the needs of a variety of customers.
Billing has become so crucial in the Internet telephony market that a wealth of vendors
are emerging ready to help service providers deal with the specific demands that this
burgeoning industry places on the provider. I present below a brief Q&A with some of
the leading billing providers in the industry. Id like to thank Gal Miara of Mind CTI and Mike Couture of Solect Technology as well as Laura Jordan of Portal Software and Dina Frale of APEX Voice Communications for taking the time to
speak with me.
RT: What does it take for a service provider supplying new services to
bundle them on one bill?
Billing software with the following capabilities:
- The ability to define the service and its tariff.
- The ability to distinguish the services and rate them separately, either in real-time or
in a post-paid manner (based on the hardwares capability to do the same).
- The ability to store the rated CDRs (call detail records) while retaining the
information for the billing phase.
- The ability to sort and sum the CDRs of each service and present each service as a
subtotal in the invoice.
Gal Miara, Mind CTI
The actual process of bundling new services onto one invoice or statement is really
only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the challenges of offering multiple bundled
services. If you look at what is behind the invoice in the operational support system
(OSS) including order entry/customer acquisition, provisioning and activation of services,
collection and mediation of usage records, rating, discounting, and billing/aggregation,
all have to occur before a charge can appear on an invoice. Historically, every new
service has given rise to a new solution, leading to stovepipe implementations. Most of
the work for one service was not repeatable for a new service. Even something as simple as
changing the pricing plan could take months and millions of dollars. Couple this legacy
with the slow evolution of traditional circuit-switched or broadcast services and
innovation really drags.
The rapidly emerging new public network addresses this on the network side. By
decoupling new applications from the underlying network, IP fosters service innovation.
However, all of these OSS challenges remain the same, and in some cases, intensify
significantly.
Mike Couture, Solect
RT: Are there problems that must be overcome to achieve a
livable billing solution?
When integrating communication systems with billing software, numerous problems in many
areas must be overcome. The needs of the consumers, the needs of the provider, the systems
involved (hardware and software), the environment (regulations, standards, language,
partnerships, etc.), future plans, not to mention a solid business entity (the billing
company) that can provide the livable/reliable software solution and prolonged maintenance
and support.
Gal Miara, Mind CTI
Absolutely, especially in the IP space. Along with the explosion of new opportunities
through new applications like unified messaging, voice over IP, streaming video, and
broadband wireless IP, comes a multiple effect in the challenges historically faced in the
circuit-switched world. Now, service providers have to be able to integrate and launch new
services, pricing plans, and bundles in days or weeks! Even a couple of months can mean
life or death for an IP provider, where competition is fierce and the market incredibly
dynamic.
Mike Couture, Solect
RT: How flexible do billing systems need to be to
accommodate the needs of their customers?
Incredibly flexible. The abundance of vendors, the lack of well accepted and common
billing standards, as well as the differences between different countries
communication environments (regulations, currency, taxes, accounting, etc.) require the
billing vendor to accommodate for a wealth of possibilities and features in a highly
flexible manner.
Gal Miara, Mind CTI
Infinitely flexible is still not flexible enough. The billing system, from provisioning
and collection right through to presentment of an invoice, must be able to deal with the
unknown service or XoIP. As a service provider, you dont know today what
killer app will come along tomorrow. You dont know how you will bill for
it (flat rate, MB, hits, duration of use, geographic, micro-events, sponsored, etc.). What
you do know is that youll need it fast. Your billing system must be able to
provision, collect, and rate anything. Also, if the service provider decides to enter a
new market segment, for example move from consumer to business, they will want to collect
very different customer information than when they were just dealing with retail
customers. This calls for new fields in the CSR interface as well as the database. Service
providers should be able to extend their billing system dynamically, without bringing the
system down or incurring costly coding delays. An HTML interface and the ability to add
extended attributes to the database is key.
Mike Couture, Solect
RT: What is the biggest challenge a provider faces when
implementing a new or enhanced billing system?
Actually 2 challenges:
- Making sure the new/enhanced system not only meets all the providers current
requirements but also includes enough flexibility and scalability in order to support new
features and requirements in the foreseeable future.
- Integrating the new/enhanced system with a previous billing system and current relevant
information systems (customer database, accounting system, etc.).
Gal Miara, Mind CTI
The biggest challenge is in prioritizing their requirements. No billing system does
everything you want, the way you want, right out of the box. If a service provider waits
to start generating value from an investment in billing until it is ideal,
they may be delaying a return on investment unnecessarily. The best way to approach it is
to phase in requirements, with much of the latter phase work done in parallel, and get
early wins to build on.
Mike Couture, Solect
RT: Please address the issues of tiered billing (gold,
silver, bronze) as well as usage-based billing.
The telecommunications market is constantly evolving and changing, from both the
technology and business aspects, and the variability is just too large (standards,
services, hardware, software). Many small, first-time carriers/telcos/ITSPs are emerging
and many mergers and acquisitions are occurring.
ISPs are moving into telephony, traditional carriers are moving into VoIP, cable
companies want to supply everything, and so on. The current buzzwords are convergent
billing or unified messaging (data, video, voice, text on the same media and in a single
invoice). The only tiering which makes sense is based on the overall system capacity in
terms of services, data/calls volume, and number of customers.
Gal Miara, Mind CTI
A key aspect to flexibility revolves around the kind of pricing plans that can be
created. This is of particular interest to a service providers marketing or product
management staff, who may not always get a large say in the selection of a billing system.
These marketing people must have the capability to rapidly create multiple pricing plans
based on the same underlying service. This cant be hard coded. For example, you must
be able to have a $9.95 subscription with 100 minutes of domestic calling, as well as a
$19.95 package with 400 minutes of calling. This implies two pricing plans based on the
same VoIP service. It also calls for usage-based billing. After 100 or 400 minutes
respectively, a charge of $0.09/minute might apply. Without usage-based billing, a service
provider loses their ability to influence consumer behavior, and loses a very powerful
differentiation tool. Both of these plans look flat rate, but they require
usage-based billing.
Mike Couture, Solect
Service providers of the world, please start thinking about your billing systems as an
integral part of the new services you offer. As customers such as myself strive for the
paperless office and paperless home, we will look to you to provide us with the
flexibility in billing that we require. Although the market may seem ripe for the taking
today, once you tarnish your image with antiquated billing systems or inadequate service,
you will lose many customers forever. Only by anticipating your customers needs
ahead of time and acting accordingly can you make sure to keep your customers loyal.
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More
Points To Ponder BY LAURA JORDAN, PORTAL SOFTWARE
New services over cable are being rolled out on a monthly basis. Service providers need
the ability to combine, in one concise package, the charges for cable modem service, VPN,
online purchases, phone line and usage for VoIP, the rental of educational software by
kids on per-use basis, and the latest video release purchased through cable modem. This
requires a customer management and billing system that can bill for online transactions as
well as basic access services.
Legacy billing systems are batch-oriented and built on inflexible architectures with
closed interfaces. Traditional cable, telephone, and wireless billing systems, each
fundamentally designed for its specific service, are unable to support the emerging
classes of data services.
The billing requirements for traditional networks are drastically different than those
for next-generation networks and services. Traditional network billing systems were custom
designed, application-specific, batch-oriented, and not built to accommodate rapid
innovation. Next-generation networks are multifunctional, can support many services, and
require instantaneous response times.
To facilitate entry into new markets, service providers are increasingly using a
best-of-breed approach. They continue to use the legacy billing system for current
services but integrate it with a new IP billing system to support new data services and
present the customer with one bill.
Advantages of this approach include: Minimal impact to existing services, freedom to
evaluate real-time technology for future services, support for a convergent bill (i.e.,
consolidated bill presentment, cross-service bundling for promotions, integrated accounts
payable, etc.), and phased implementation for rapid market entry.
The four biggest challenges providers face when implementing a new service are sunk
costs, seamless integration with the existing system, rapid deployment of the new system,
and supporting the need for comprehensive real-time authentication and authorization,
service provisioning, usage tracking, and rating. |