The global telecom industry has witnessed rapid changes over the last three decades, and these changes have led to a massive improvement in service provision and delivery. These changes were highly influenced by a series of cutting edge technology deployed by service providers to improve their services, earn the trust of their subscribers, and to boost profit margins. One of the infrastructures that have transformed telecommunication pricing processes is a telecom billing system.
Why Telecom Billing Software became so important?
The complexity involved in the traditional model of pricing influenced the need for active players in the industry to come up with an efficient billing system that served the interest of service providers and subscribers. To improve billing efficiency, providers of billing solutions and systemshave added several functional features to their billing software to ensure that telecom operators and callers do not encounter issues when it comes to pricing.
Telecom Billing Solution Process
A telecom operator making use of a telecom billing software runs with the following steps in sequential order.
- Step 1: Data collection of call logs
- Step 2: Storage of all call data in a central customer database
- Step 3: Calculation of the charges for all calls
- Step 4: Bill processing for each individual customer
- Step 5: invoice Generation
- Step 6: Mailing invoices to individual callers/subscribers
Telecom Billing Concepts to take note of
As a telecom operator, there are key concepts you need to be familiar with in order to make your business’s transition to a telecom billing system a smooth one. These concepts are:
- Call details records (CDR) –A CDR contains the billing information for a particular call. Some of the major details you can access in a CDR file include the call duration, time of call, call destination, and the source number.
- Matching – Also referred to as call guiding, this is done by the telecom billing software matching all call records with their appropriate call tariffs.
- Rating engineering – During a billing cycle, the telecom billing system/software places a monetary value on calls incurred by an account
- Billing – Essentially, this is a compilation of calls made during a 30 days cycle with tax, discounts, and promotions inclusive
- Mediation – The collection of call data has to be validated for the purpose of transparency
- Customer Bill Cycle –Customers are grouped into batches by the system, and each group has a separate bill cycle different from the next. This enables the operator to bill customers in batches at intervals.
Benefits of Telecom Billing to Service operators and providers
Telecom billing software has been widely adopted by service operators the world over for their several benefits and advantages over traditional billing practices. As a service operator, if you adopt an advanced billing system, you should expect the following benefits.
- Itemized billing is made easy
Telecom Billing allows you to provide detailed and error-free bills to your customers, thereby avoiding disputes and potential litigation from your customers.
- Accurate and Transparent billing
Managing a large number of customers at a time was not an easy thing to do in the days of archaic billing systems. Today, with the introduction of technologically driven billing systems, operators can manage pricing for a large pool of customers in a transparent manner.
- Customer Information at your fingertips
A robust telecom billing system ensures that customer service agents and company executives are able to draw out customer information at short notice. This helps in conflict resolution with customers should issues arise.
- Limitation of duplicate records
Duplicate records are not uncommon, especially when a customer makes several outgoing calls within a short window over several days or weeks. This creates a problem of its own during the billing cycle. Issues like fake customer information are also issues telecom operators have to deal with in order to stay on the right side of the law. Installing and deploying billing software is one way to avoid information redundancy and fraud.
- It is easier to implement tariff changes
If your company changes tariffs regularly due to industry regulations or competition,then cutting edge billing software will be required to execute these changes without causing service disruptions of any kind. With telecom billing software, you can implement changes to your billing process when the need arises.
Conclusion
The need to incorporate an effective billing infrastructure to meet the need of your growing customer base cannot be overemphasized at this point. If you seek a cost-effective and flexible telecom billing system that ticks all the right boxes, then Tridens Monetization is your best bet. Our billing system allows you to collate caller information, place a price on calls, raise invoices, and manage customer records efficiently.
