For communications service providers (CSPs) dancing with capricious consumers who flit from partner to partner, increasingly spending their communications budget with a growing number of players, the large corporate and government sector offers a promising new dancing companion, with greater margins, more stability and a growing revenue opportunity. Monica Ricci explains the billing challenges.
Enterprises across the globe, driven by the ongoing convergence of communications and IT, increasingly seek new services and content while looking to reduce both costs and the administrative burden of managing these newservices and technologies. For ongoing efficiency and consistency reasons, enterprises prefer a single consort to dance with; they do want to consolidate their services under a single CSP’s umbrella. However, the dances are getting harder to master: employees’ work patterns are evolving to rely increasingly on remote working and mobility, both elevating support demands. CSPs who successfully provide service to large corporations and governments acknowledge that BSS requirements for this sector differ from those needed to serve their retail customers. Enterprise billing – the process of calculating, generating and managing bills for large corporate or government contracts – involves more than just performing the same tasks in greater volumes; it adds complexity to the billing process that cannot be ignored if this lucrative segment is to be served successfully.
Customer acquisition and order management
The acquisition process requires the ultimate in flexibility to deliver the ultimate in complexity. The enterprise or government business will almost always seek communications contracts through a tender process, and the criteria by which the CSP wins the enterprise’s business is largely based upon the solution’s flexibility to meet each individual set of corporate requirements, packaged with unique, consolidated pricing and commercial terms. No two enterprise contracts are alike, either in terms of the package of services offered or in the commercial terms and conditions. Enterprise order management and provisioning must support every possible telecoms service in every possible combination. This in turn demands maximum flexibility and automation to ensure accuracy throughout the process. Enterprise orders contain countless dependencies, usually including a number of third party providers and installation teams, and SLA monitoring and alarming is critical to ensure that this first step in the dance gets off on the right foot by meeting the customer’s needs. The enterprise BSS must support the broadest range of telecoms and related services in a consolidated fashion. This includes traditional network based services that provide the connectivity and bandwidth – to all of an enterprise’s locations, both physical and virtual; to all the enterprise’s employees who are increasingly mobile and utilise a growing number of connected devices; and to the growing volume of data, content and applications that are demanded by customers today. The network technologies required to connect an enterprise are numerous, and the CSP must provide Customer Premise Equipment (CPE), business applications, domain name registrations and email management, mobile connections and equipment, and increasingly, cloud services, desktop management, installation and IT outsourcing to accompany thisconnectivity and technology.
Filling the dance card:
pricing and billing
This mixed bag of networks, devices, content and services requires every type of charging algorithm. While retail billing systems specialise in a particular line of business and particular charging algorithms, the enterprise billing system must enable all. T1/E1s are charged based upon service address, nodes and capacity between each node. CPE is usually contracted in bulk and charged at any point in time by the number of devices actually in use, and is associated with warranty periods and replacement cycles. Human resources for installation, support and management are based upon time and materials, and may frequently be associated with up-front or regular allotments that are subsequently decremented as services are delivered. And of course, many of the services consumed by the enterprise users have an associated usage-based charge, which increasingly can be derived from any number of parameters including bandwidth, QoS, or a value determined by the third party who provides content or applications. In the enterprise billing business, the single, consolidated billing system must support each of these pricing mechanisms, as well as overlaying higher-level contractual
terms and discounts for the bundle.
May I cut in? Managing third parties
As the bundle of services delivered to the enterprise expands, the service provider increasingly relies upon third party partners to enable components of the package. These third parties can provide complementary services enabled by connectivity and bandwidth; content and applications to which they own the rights; network services in another geography which the service provider doesn’t serve; or infrastructure services. Managing the third parties in the value chain has implications across the BSS, includingreceiving usage records or service status from hird party sources that must be interpreted, correlated, priced and billed; managing the purchase order process not only between service provider and customer, but between vendor and service provider; and determining revenue share and settlement amounts with these vendors for their services
Covering the entire dance floor: an enterprise-wide view
Enterprises require billing-related features and data that surpass those delivered by a typical retail biller. These must include:
• Providing consolidated and easily-understood views of the customer’s organisation structure (human resources), networks and geographies (physical infrastructure), financial relationships (billing and payment responsibility), and utilisation (usage data)
• Enabling flexible, customised service bundles and price plans – typically negotiated exclusively with that customer
• Supporting reporting, not only billing views, but on the other views that enterprise customers rely upon to monitor, manage and reconcile telecoms resources most efficiently. These views are often considered alternative hierarchies – payment hierarchies, legal hierarchies, pricing hierarchies – all related to different aspects of the corporate customer’s business, all important, and all defined differently.
Today’s CSP, with an expanding footprint and a vision to serve the complex needs of enterprises, manages a plethora of billing systems; it is not unheard of for a CSP to operate dozens of different billing systems across their business. When the case to replace one or all of these individual billers with an enterprise system cannot be made, a common approach is to implement a biller that consolidates billing data from the individual upstream processes. This consolidated biller acts as the system of record for end-to-end enterprise customer management and billing, and must:
• Take feeds from the individual upstream billing systems, and rate them, re-rate them, or pass through the pre-rated charge directly to the consolidated invoice.
• Apply the enterprise contract terms and propagate them across the service, organisation and billing hierarchies.
• Generate invoices, statements and customised reporting for each enterprise level.
• Support multi-language, multi-currency and multi-tax processing for multi-national customers.
• Manage the billing reconciliation process, which for enterprises is extensive and lengthy. Managing disputes and adjustments is particularly complicated, as the enterprise biller must flow this information back to the legacy upstream billing systems.
• Serve as the system of record for general ledger journal entries.
• Support all of the processes within defined SLA terms, which can mean churning through some very high transaction volumes in very tight timeframes. Enterprise bills with hundreds of thousands of services and tens of millions of transactions are not uncommon, and need to be delivered by a certain date.
• Support automated onboard of services and hierarchy changes. The enterprise customer himself usually maintains this data internally, and shares electronically via regular updates. If and when this process fails, the CSP must reconcile, and perform Moves, Adds and Changes as efficiently as possible to reduce operational costs and ensure accuracy.
Just like professional ballroom dancers, CSPs who have mastered the complexity of enterprise billing make it look effortless. Deals struck at one meeting can be executed by the next; ongoing management of contracts and maintenance of hierarchies and agreements can be automated; invoices can be delivered in days and sliced and diced for reporting. The risks are high for those who don’t achieve a professional standard: 10% of enterprise customers have terminated a provider’s contract because of poor billing performance . And the performance that scores top marks in flexibility, throughput and automated management across the complex value chain will have them crying out for an encore.
