As communications service providers (CSPs) focus more and more on creating differentiation through superior customer experience management, it has become clear that billing and charging are critical enablers of great CEM, write Eyal Amit and Jonah Pransky.
Put a group of different telecoms professionals in a room, mention customer experience management, and each person will think you’re talking specifically to them – that’s how focused the telecoms industry has become on how to deliver the right customer experience. So you’ve got the network engineers bringing up quality of service and experience, the care team talking about call handling and resolution, and with the billing team, it’s all about bill accuracy and clarity.
They’re not wrong though – customer experience management definitely means different things to different people, but you can break it down into two major aspects.
- The experience your customer has when actually consuming your products
- The experience the consumer has when interacting with their service provider
Most of the customer’s daily experience is about being a consumer, when they are actually using their devices and applications. Unless quality of service is either really good or really bad, the service provider isn’t consciously – or actively – associated with this daily experience.
Yet there are also those moments when the consumer behaves like a customer – shopping for and ordering new products, contacting the call centre, receiving and paying a bill. It’s in those moments that CSPs need to shine in order to keep their relationship with that customer, and maximise the value of that relationship.
That’s where charging and billing come in – when it comes to delivering an exceptional customer experience, charging and billing play a key role in both of these aspects.
Online charging is moving centre stage in real-time
Why the focus on real-time? As part of an ongoing process to protect consumers against bill shock, governments and legislative bodies have been collaborating to establish a unified code of conduct. So European Union legislation currently mandates CSPs to notify their end customers at the exact moment they have consumed €50 worth of services in their monthly billing cycle. This applies whether they are roaming or in their home country.
In parallel with this, CSPs have also been working towards giving their customers the ability to set their own personalised preferences when it comes to receiving notifications, such as when nearing the end of their service allowance. The customer also gets to decide the course of action following that notification: whether to end the service, freeze it, add funds and so on. These courses of action necessitate real-time notifications, which are driven by constant real-time metering of the customers’ allowances.
The online charging system is the primary component responsible for performing these processes, assuring notifications are accurate and sent at the right time, managing top-up payments and more.
Proactive online charging is also critical for supporting personalised plans, which service providers hope will help keep their customers loyal. Service providers are ramping up their quality of experience beyond just technical capabilities, by making it personal – they want to give customers the ability to create individualised plans so they can to choose the exact services they want, the networks they will run on, the validity period and so on.
Shared data plans – a single data/voice allowance for all members of a family or group, and hybrid plans, which combine prepaid and postpaid customers into a single entity, are both particularly challenging to support.
In order to ensure that quality of experience is met with these service plans, the parallel consumption of data or voice services need to be monitored in realtime. Consumption notifications must be provided to users ahead of time by the online charging system, as well as a wide range of system services, including plan activations, real-time changes and quota re-allocation for group members.
A new billing experience is interactive
While the monthly bill may be a CSP’s most consistent – and usually most frequent – interaction with their customers, most customers don’t regard it a positive one. Receiving and paying bills often leaves customers questioning the value of the service they receive, and the bill itself is generally business-like and unclear to the average consumer. Not to mention that today, a paper bill, or even a PDF, leaves a lot to be desired in terms of a ‘wow’ user experience.
And despite pressure to go green, in reality CSPs haven’t been able to replace the paper bill with electronic bill presentment – although many have tried. In fact, a recent Amdocs survey of global service providers found that an average of only 22% of their customers have gone paperless. This may be due to the perceived convenience of the paper bill mailed directly to the home, as opposed to online self-service channels which are guarded by logins and passwords.
This leaves CSPs spending large amounts of money on paper bills that at best leave customers feeling unengaged and at worst, confuse or upset them, thus driving them to contact the call centre. Clearly, it is time for a new billing experience – not just paperless, but also interactive, and one that customers will find easy to use.
As part of our CES 9.3 release, Amdocs has launched the Omni-Channel Billing Experience solution – an end-to-end system for bill processing, bill generation and bill presentment. It allows CSPs to easily design and personalise bills for print, PDF and online channels and ensures that data is consistently displayed across those channels. But most importantly for the customer experience, it also includes new interactive email bill functionality. This provides customers with an interactive HTML bill where they can simply tap or click for explanations of their charges, information on promotions or to pay or dispute a charge. The interactive email bill is pushed conveniently to your customers’ mailbox, giving them the best of both worlds – the convenience of a push communication with the interactivity of digital bill presentment. This will help CSPs provide a better billing experience, and drive higher adoption of paperless billing.
So for all of you billing and charging professionals. The next time you are in a room and someone brings up customer experience management, raise your hands. They are talking to you.
