subject: Telecom Billing Software: Nuts And Bolts [print this page] The telecom domain is a very exciting area now a days. We now have everything from a simple phone line to mobile cellular phones. Today with so many offerings and bundling options, customers have the freedom to choose what they want and how they use the services. As an ISP it is important that regardless of the customer usage, every byte that travels through the network is accounted for. This is the importance of telecom billing OSS.
Billing systems have an important task to play in all kinds of services on offer, regardless of how simple or complex it may be. PSTN phone lines have been around for ages, so billing their usage should be straight forward. This is true as long as we do not include things like long distance and international calls. Different areas have different rates and they need to be billed properly. Similarly, when a customer moves operators and wants to retain their phone number, that throws up a new billing challenge.
The more modern solutions, like cellular services, have even more complexities in offerings. In developed nations, the introduction of 3G services has meant that mobile networks are now being used for both voice and data services. The rates for both are different and so are their usages. In the developing nations, there are multiple short term and long term plans for plain 2G voice services too. The billing systems need to address all these variations.
It is clear that billing systems are great for telecom operators and they cover everything from traditional phone lines to the latest data plans on 3G mobile networks. But there are some costs and implementation considerations that one needs to be cognizant of while installing these systems. Everything from hardware to customer care services need to be looked at.
Getting good hardware fast enough and reliable enough to run good software is a great starting point. The next is the telecom billing OSS that will be tracking all the usages and billing accordingly. The third aspect is the billing cycle. While ideally it would great to have individual customer billing cycles, it may not be a practical solution. Most billing solutions adopt the batch processing approach; you determining the billing cycles is important.
Another equally important part of the billing solution is distributing the bills to the customers and collecting their payments. The bill distribution can be the traditional printed bills or the newer online bills. Either way, the bill information needs to reach the user well in advance. The next step is to facilitate the collection of bill payments. Drop boxes, auto payments, tie ups with banks and online are some options.
Finally, is the customer support on the billing queries. It is not surprising that most customers get queries on the billing details as they feel over charged. A good support base is required, one that can handle all these queries and settle the issues amicably with the customers.
