Billing and your Business Strategy
For success, every Business Strategy needs to pay requisite attention to a) what they want to charge their customers for and b) how to produce accurate bill & collect correct money. Although, this may sound like a first rule in business, many organizations – large and small, do not give adequate attention to this critical piece and end-up losing customers and fail to achieve their business goals.
With the changing competitive environment and the new age/ innovative multi-party business models, the Business Strategies invariably change. However, the investment in refining the systems that help with customer acquisition, order/service management, Rating and Billing systems, bill presentment tend to lag by several months, if not years. The results are obvious that they miss-out on achieving their goals.
For the customers, prompt service management, accurate and timely bills, flexibility for making payments, etc, are key elements of “Trust for long term relationship”. Hence, to succeed in the present competitive market environment, investing in the evolution of robust Billing and collection systems and processes to win the customers trust is ‘key’ for successful implementation of any business strategy. The Organizations, who get this right, will succeed with any Business Strategy in any market conditions.In view of the above, the main areas of focus for a successful billing implementation would include – a network agnostic, flexible Rating capability, a feature rich and scalable Billing capability that supports management of life cycle of retail & corporate customers, product life cycle management, versatile bundling and discounting features that helps with cross-selling and up-selling, simple and flexible bill presentment and collection management features and so-on. For the operators that offer enriched services with third party content and services, a billing solution that has matured with managing multi-party services and relationship management capabilities would be critical for running the business smoothly.
To maximize the business value of the implementation of a sophisticated and robust billing solution the emphasis should be on accurate mapping of the Business process requirements to the capabilities of the solution. Besides a good implementation, the success of a Business Strategy depends on establishing foolproof Business processes around the implemented solution, staff training and effective communication within the Organization, with the partners and suppliers.
If anyone has any comments, views, thoughts or related experience on the above topic, please feel free to share. I would love to hear from you. You can also reach me on my email id Nagaraja_S@Infosys.com.
Comments
For long, Billing has been thought of just another component in the CSP’s BSS landscape, but it happens to be one of the most critical one. And why not, it is responsible for one of the most critical business function i.e. charging the right money for the right products/ services at the right time. With ever increasing competition in the CSP space and the availability of plethora of service providers for the customers to choose from, it is important that these functions are done right, the first time, every time.
Posted by: Kanwar Virender | February 12, 2010 01:21 PM