Bill Shock rules for Communications Industry - What's in store?
Few days ago, a major mobile operator in one of European Union (EU) countries implemented a BSS solution from a leading billing product vendor, meeting the mandatory EU regulations; much in advance to the stipulated timelines for all EU operators. This has been achieved by implementing real time rating & charging solution for mobile voice & data usage.
This year EU has mandated telecommunications providers to ensure better control over usage cost incurred by mobile data roamers within EU. It stipulates service providers to notify their subscribers through text message as & when threshold on data roaming usage charges is reached. This will avoid big shockers for customers when they see their monthly phone bills.
Taking clues from EU, FCC (Federal Communications Commission - USA) is seriously considering putting in similar rules of alerting consumers on potential high usage charges in bill. This is in lieu of increase in number of large scale law suits in US involving major communication providers. In US market, there has been significant increase in number of customer complaints getting bills in thousands outside their contract usage due to their unawareness of associated charges on voice or data roaming or not knowing when they exceeded their monthly contract usage limits. Hence, the proposed legislation requires service providers to notify subscribers when they reach 80% of their monthly credit limits and taking customer consent before charging for additional usage charges outside their contracts.
However, simply putting legislations & enforcing CSPs to control subscriber bills may not work. In a competitive market world scenario like today, these rules might counter fire & add more to technology costs. Also, Over-usage is just one-dimension of Bill Shocks. It has other dimensions like wrong billing charges, excessive rental charges, charging one time charges outside their contractual plans, duplicate usage or rental charges, etc. There are the times when subscribers do not get to see their phone bills for months together and end up getting bill on arrears running into thousands......
