Billing platforms set resellers free to develop even stronger relationships with customers based on the meaningful management of their data, but only if resellers adopt the latest margin rich products and services, says Steve Redman, Commercial Manager for Aurora Kendrick James (AKJ).
First and foremost, a billing platform needs to be fit for purpose. This means allowing the reseller to bill accurately and in a timely manner the products and services they sell to the end customer. The processing speed of the billing platform needs to support the reseller's requirement in this regard, including the ability to scale up as the reseller grows. That said, the timeliness of a billing process is about more than just the speed of the software. An efficient billing operation covers the whole month's activities - daily rating, tariff rate management, updating customer details, invoice design changes and many more. The fastest billing platform won't allow a reseller to get bills out on the first of the month if a backlog of tariff updates still needs to be applied.
But the biggest issue in the billing space right now is the erosion of call margins. Resellers need to be able to embrace new style products and services then manage them properly within their billing system to stay competitive and grow their business. But this brings greater sophistication. As billing solutions become more complex with higher levels of back office system integrations and 24/7 operations, the need for the billing system to be hosted on highly available IT infrastructure becomes greater.
This requires a level of IT investment in hardware and personnel that is greater than many resellers are willing or able to make. As such, AKJ would recommend a cost-effective hosted option. The security of hosted solutions is an important consideration, along with disaster recovery, system availability and performance. Chosen carefully, a hosted solution can offer far more security resilience than most internal IT infrastructures. The risks, however, should be no greater than for a solution hosted in house.
Another key element in the mix of new services offered by today's billing software is the ability to combat fraud activity using a billing system's fraud capabilities such as AKJ's Affinity platform. However, the billing software is only as effective as the information entered into it. And a billing system is not the best tool to identify fraud quickly if the only input is a monthly CDR data feed where a number of weeks fraudulent activity has taken place.
Fraud should be managed as close to real-time as possible. Switchless resellers typically receive, at best, daily CDR feeds from suppliers. For these resellers the billing system can play a key role in monitoring usage and provide reporting and alerting for scenarios deemed unexpected. This can cover genuine fraud and, for the end customer, misuse. For example, high cost calls, long duration calls and calls to unexpected destinations.
Also beneficial is integration with back office software, especially for resellers who want grow their product range and add more customers, more staff and more information. A typical end customer will use five software packages in the lifecycle of a sale - a sales system, a provisioning tool, a billing system an accounts package and a CRM database. The benefit or otherwise of integration to other back office software depends on how the reseller manages their version of the above process, and who at which stage needs to know information that may be captured at a different stage.
For example, does the sales person looking to cross sell a product need to be aware that the customer hasn't paid their last invoice, or that there are three fault tickets requiring attention? Independent back office systems performing these various roles lessens the ability to easily share information, and also lessens efficiency if information needs to be entered and maintained in multiple systems.
Another of today's big considerations is a customer's mobile strategy. Mobile billing differs from traditional fixed line, and the complex nature of tariffing options, sharer tariffs, bundles and equipment, plus roaming and other mobile services, along with various taxation rules for these, all add up to the two being very different. This difference is further highlighted once billing reconciliation comes into play. Identifying whether a reseller's tariffs are cost-effective, whether end customers are on appropriate tariffs for their usage profile and so on, becomes highly complex once all the criteria are taken into consideration.
For all of the reasons outlined above, often the billing software is not enough to allow resellers to manage a converged fixed and mobile customer base. But a billing solution such as AKJ's Affinity platform combined with a consultative approach provides the knowledge and expertise to help resellers understand and manage the converged network environment, and have confidence in their ability to manage their business and customers effectively.•