IP telephony is driving down prices for voice services while requiring new investment in infrastructure, so the last thing service providers want to do is exacerbate their margin loss by ignoring revenue leakage.
“All the service providers are deploying a lot of new equipment for VoIP and don’t have a fast return on investment [for that equipment] like they did with legacy networks, so they need to make sure every call is billed for,” says Ruth Cox, vice president of marketing for Connexn Technologies, a cost and revenue assurance solution provider.
To help make that happen, Connexn President and CEO Woody Ritchey suggests that service providers should check the data integrity of their existing customer databases before making the move to VoIP. Ritchey says Connexn helps companies do that by enabling a multipoint comparison of the data. For example, the Connexn solution can compare billing data and switch data. If it finds discrepancies between the two, it can correct that data in its databases and in the carrier’s business rules.
Because Connexn’s software can touch any interface, it can tap into billing, switch, ERP, CRM, mediation, provisioning and activation systems from other vendors, adds Ritchey. Connexn has an ecosystem approach through which it works with other vendors in those billing and back-office areas to deliver integrated solutions that allow the Connexn system to push and receive data from the other vendors’ systems.
For example, at the Billing World show this spring, Connexn announced an ecosystem partnership with billing and customer care vendor CSG Systems that will enable the companies to deliver end-to-end revenue assurance. The ecosystem approach enabled by Connexn and its partners, Ritchey adds, also can help service providers to identify their most profitable customers or to identify those customers that are the best candidates for particular new products or specific promotions.
Betty Cockrell, director of industry relations at Billing Concepts Inc., notes VoIP also creates a lot of new questions about access billing beyond database cleansing and BSS/OSS interworking.
That’s because VoIP services are not tied to geography. Companies like Vonage allow users to choose any area code regardless of their physical locations and to take that area code with them as they move. “On the access billing side, it really messes with pre-established processes,” Cockrell says. “It will be interesting to see how it affects billing and settlement.”
VoIP also changes the complexion of voice billing, given that typically it’s not based on minutes of use, the measurement around which many regulations for voice services have been established. VoIP also erases the distinction between local and long-distance services that was created at the breakup of Ma Bell.
Cockrell says people are only beginning to consider the billing challenges surrounding VoIP. Much of it will hinge on regulatory decisions down the road. But standards organization the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) also has been active in addressing some of these issues, she says.
ATIS was due to release a data interchange work plan, John Bernhards, a spokesman for the organization, told xchange in late April. That work plan will identify the standardization work required related to data interchange on a number of fronts; it will list what industry bodies should be involved with that work; and it will provide a schedule of deliverables based on that work. ATIS also is doing similar work related to various aspects of VoIP, among other services and technologies, says Bernhards.
