In recent years, telecom has been shifting more towards product diversification. Instead of selling a simple SIM card, telcos are now expanding their sales to include wireless Internet, fiber optics, and cloud subscriptions among many other services. This trend generally stems from the intention of CSPs around the world to variegate their sources of revenue.
This diversity in products, however, raises a serious issue: How can we maintain a wide assortment of products while keeping the billing process smooth and hassle-free?
And this is where the concept of convergent billing came to the rescue. In short, convergent billing is “the integration of all service charges onto a single customer invoice and a unified view of the customer.” In other words, it enables customers to buy a variety of telecom products then receive a single bill and make one single payment for all these products.
But in order for convergent billing to work best, it requires proper collaboration with the rest of the components of your BSS apparatus.
Coping with the complexity of products and customer needs
CRM plays a pivotal role in ensuring that customers pay their bills without facing any problems. Your CRM software needs to integrate with the billing system to provide CSRs (customer service representatives) with a holistic view of the customer and their associated products. This information is essential to understanding the customer to be able to provide them with superb service.
A bundle of products, one bill
For the financial aspect of the convergent billing model, there needs to be one single bill delivered to the customer which contains the list of all the products they bought, itemized with the price of each as well the total price that they need to pay. This is more or less similar to the bill you’d receive at the supermarket. Also, accounting-wise, once a payment has been made successfully, it needs to be registered in the accounts receivable records.
As such, all of this requires a powerful, standard-abiding convergent billing system capable of processing all these complex data in real-time and error-free.
Infrastructure integration
Nowadays, there is an ever-growing variety of different telecom products. This necessitates the adoption of powerful and versatile systems capable of interacting with a wide range of systems. Two of these core network systems are:
- Mediation gateway: The growing product variety has made the role of the mediation gateway more pivotal than ever. A powerful mediation system should be capable of handling a wide range of data services and interacting with a wide range of network elements, data generators, and IT nodes from various vendors.
- Intelligent Network (IN): The IN is responsible for managing the service rating and customer balance validation processes which are needed for proper bill creation. Therefore, proper integration with the IN is essential for maintaining the billing process in a telecom business that offers a diverse assortment of products and services. A reliable digital convergent billing system requires integration with a state-of-the-art digital charging system to handle convergent rating processes across this diverse assortment of products and services.
Collections & dunning
Your collection and dunning process need to be aware of the various products a customer has. By integrating your collection management software with your CRM and billing software, you can have a 360 view of your customers. This would enable you to include other products a delinquent customer has so you can include them in your dunning process. You probably wouldn’t want to ignore the fact a customer has long neglected to pay for one product and have them keep enjoying the rest of your products. At a minimum, you may want to send them notifications that they need to pay their overdue bill(s) to avoid service interruption to their other products. This also minimizes your risk since if a customer ignores to pay what they owe for a product, they are likely to do the same with the rest.
External system integration
Since different types of products and services may come from numerous providers, a reliable digital convergent billing system need to be able to work in harmony with a wide range of diverse systems. Besides interacting with other systems within the company such as those mentioned above, your convergent billing system needs to work effortlessly with various 3rd party systems in order for it to be fully functional. Roaming services, for instance, require interaction between different mediation gateways, billing/charging systems, and several other entities. Having secure standard APIs is key for having a coherent billing process throughout.
At ESKADENIA, we have a top-notch digital convergent billing software built-in complete adherence to TM Forum standards.
Also, feel free to check out ESKADENIA’s wide array of other telecom products
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