As services become more customized and tailored to the subscriber, requirements for billing change accordingly. People want to view their bill when, how and where they want it, and providers can use such customer-centricity as a differentiator and a profit-maker.
“This shift from the siloed network linked to a service to one that supports bundled and blended services means that service providers have to be customer-focused while offering a superior customer experience,” says Mike Couture, vice president of marketing at Amdocs. “They need to ensure that they can bill the customers in a more personal way while making that relationship profitable.”
For instance, service providers can serve customers with service levels commensurate with the value they bring. “Some customers you’ll want to move to EBPP, others are on a post-paid plan but should be on a prepaid plan, some get dumped into an IVR, while others have premium account service, and so on,” Couture notes. “Tailoring the offering means tailoring the business processes too. This will tie in business intelligence and CRM to billing, for an integrated view of the customer.”
 Exstream Software’s Dialogue enables document personalization. |
Service providers also can fulfill customer requirements for a personalized billing relationship while bolstering profitability by tapping new distribution channels. For instance, the TV may become a service provider’s main interface to the customers, so telcos could use that screen to deliver billing and account information in addition to providing programming. Making billing information accessible to the consumer through the TV interface can lower service provider costs by answering questions that otherwise would have to be supported by the call center.
Such innovation also allows for a one-to-one billing construct. Service providers can add to their services’ appeal by enabling customers to create different accounts for adults and children, with preset spending limits on each for on-demand content purchases. A service provider even could offer a “buddy list” type of feature that would allow individuals, such as babysitters, to have on-demand content billed to their own accounts while away from home. The Intec solution, which has been available for about six months, also allows service providers to offer their customers a TV-based electronic interface for billing disputes.
Another personal billing feature service providers could offer is gift certificates for network-based services. “The more payment options you have, the more likely you are to make a payment,” says Thomas B. Pedersen, director of IP business lines for Intec.
If you extend this model of a personal billing relationship to mean the ability to view “any information over any device,” the requirements become deeper for service providers. “In the wireless space, the handset typically offers limited capabilities; one can’t view call details,” says Jack Storer, Intec’s director of business development. “It is both constrained by device real estate and network latency. It’s not a very compelling experience, let alone a differentiator.”
However, carriers can change that by using push technologies. “Operators can allow customers to define the triggers and thresholds to initiate a text message that is pushed to them, with specific info,” says Storer. “Ideally, this would be part of a dialogue with the customer to allow them to reply to the message with a response to guide what happens next. For example, I may want to be notified when my family-shared minutes are used up and how much each family member has used. I may want to shut off Junior to let him cool his calling habits. This requires a real-time rating infrastructure that can immediately trigger the message once a threshold has been breached.”
Communicating appropriate information during bill presentment is another key aspect of better, more customer-focused and profitable billing. To that end, service providers should leverage the data they have about their customers to deliver relevant information in that most important of real estate assets, the bill itself.
“The service provider needs one view of the customer, so they’re not offering consumers stuff they already have or things not available in their area,” says Jim Norton, vice president of telecommunications practice at Exstream Software Inc., which makes the Dialogue engine for federating customer data for bill customization. “Otherwise, they think that the provider just doesn’t have its act together.” Dialogue reads information from multiple databases in multiple back-office systems, then uses business rules to insert marketing or informational messages on the bill. “We can associate the household and its members with the right services, while reducing calls to the call center and masking some of the uglier legacy systems a telco might have.”
Offering a better customer experience in a more profitable way along with innovative services at good price points are the frontlines of the competitive battlefield, says Couture. “Billing is an important part of that move to personalization.”
Paula Bernier contributed to this article.
| Links |
| Amdocs www.amdocs.com Exstream Software Inc. www.exstream.com Intec Telecom Systems www.intec-telecom-systems.com |
