Telecom Billing Solution: Nuts And Bolts

Telecom Billing Solution is a important component in the set of systems that modern telecom services providers need to deliver the service. It has very little to do with actually delivering the service or maintaining the service, but a lot to do with collecting the revenues that keep the ISP running.

With a wide range of service offerings across various media, flexible and robust systems are useful.

Today, there are nuances and challenges in almost every service that is delivered to the customer. Though the local calls are free for a flat monthly rate, your typical land line phone can offer other services too. Things like long distance calls, international calls, voice mail services, etc. Each of these has a different rate and billing structure. So your billing system needs to handle these correctly.

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.

While ISPs may be convinced to go for a telecom billing solution, given its benefits, it is not a simple step. Developing and deploying a robust billing solution requires some investment and lot of planning. Everything must be done right - from the correct software to bill the customer to setting up a team to address customer billing issue, all need to be implemented.

Getting good hardware fast enough and reliable enough to run good software is a great starting point. The next is the software 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.

The final spoke in the billing solution wheel is the billing inquiry support system. Customers can be billed incorrectly due to errors from the ISP or software problems. Alternative, the customer can interpret the bills incorrectly. Whatever the problem, the issue need a resolution. The customer care department need to address these.

In conclusion, telecom billing solution is a great option that ISPs pursue to ensure that revenues keep coming regardless of the service offerings they provide to the customers. Adopting a telecom billing solution requires a good understanding and study of various aspects. A good knowledge of these can help in building a great telecom billing OSS that delivers the best results.

• tags:
• telecomOSS
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• telecombillingOSS
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• telecombillingsoftware
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• telecombillingsolution
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• telecombillingsystem

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