Bills are an indispensable part of any business transaction. They are perhaps the most regular and important communication between service providers and their customers. For service provider, they are the culmination of their revenue objectives. For customers, they form one of the prime bases for the evaluation of service expectations.

Ironically, in the Indian telecom industry, bills are often confusing, and generate more questions than answers. It is important to understand the business objectives and customer expectations that revolve round bills and the way they can be mapped to each other (See Figure).

A clear understanding of such objectives and expectations makes the continuous tuning of the billing processes and practices highly imperative. This becomes more crucial in the telecommunications industry where the billing practices form not just a back-office function. These practices and solutions have significant bearing on the front-office functions of new-product developments, customer and service activation, and order management. Any lacunae in billing practices can have a direct impact on customer satisfaction and churn.

In India, billing processes and practices of service providers are much inferior to those of their more-developed European and US counterparts. Private operators have started to leverage the technological advances but still one observes a host of billing inaccuracies and related customer complaints. Government-run operators lag all the more in billing management and customer service initiatives.

Let us look at the most common and widespread billing issues and the ways to make billing practices up to the international mark. Technological advances have led to the development of enhanced billing solutions that now manage the entire revenue chain. These solutions can be leveraged to implement enhanced billing practices and improve customer
satisfaction.

Be Accurate

Bills must be accurate. The revenue life cycle in telecom involves multiple interfaces across different processes. Ensuring the completeness and accuracy of billing requires measures that instill process-level and end-to-end controls. Duplicate calls, non-billable calls, local calls charged on toll-rates or wrong application of rate plans are all very common examples of inaccuracy. All charges that have been levied on the customer must be adequately explained.

Keep no Ambiguity

Bills must be clear and should provide information on calls and usage in a form understandable and acceptable to the customer. It is very important that bills provide the complete information about various types of charges, rate plans subscribed and payment adjustments in an unambiguous manner. Further, customer service representatives (CSRs) should also have the complete information about components of bills and other available options.

Deliver on Time

Service providers should ensure that bills are delivered on time and in an expected manner (mail, e-mail or fax). Charging process is delayed very often, especially in case of new service subscriptions and changes in rate plans. Conventional billing systems and processes were not equipped to consider such changes in a billing cycle. Such delays increase the incidence of bad debts and also lead to considerable customer disdain. Further, the customer should never be penalized for delays

.Resolve Disputes Quickly

Billing errors crop up in spite of precautions and systems. Data entry errors, incorrect postings or inaccurate data extraction can cause such errors. These lead to customer complaints. When a customer calls to seek a clarification or correction, it is important that all queries are satisfactorily resolved in least time. This involves a significant level of interaction between billing and customer care functions.

At times, service provider systems are not integrated to access on-line information and remedy the problem. Even in cases they can access the information, they may be unable to update the record or correct the problem. As a result, CSRs can often be seen fumbling over queries on the roaming usage or data charges for SMS.

Don’t Let a Problem Re-occur

Whether it is a service complaint or a billing dispute, the likelihood of a problem occurring increases if it has occurred before. Most often, problems are repeated because they have not been analyzed properly and the root cause has not been eliminated, or because corrections have been done at some places but not at others. Moreover, the growth often outpaces process-tuning efforts. In developed countries, special revenue assurance departments keep control over leakage due to errors and in the process keep tab over repetitive problems. However, such departments are yet to fully evolve in India.

Increased automation of processes can now ensure that problems arising due to computational errors or wrong processing logic can be remedied completely. However, continuous tuning of billing practices for bill accuracy will most certainly be required to keep them in sync with the growing scale.

Make Customer Interaction Uniform

Till recently, the only way to get your phone repaired was to personally visit the telephone office and wait for the lineman. This is still true in certain areas.

Customer needs to have more than one way of reaching the service provider.

Telephone , fax, IVR and personal visit are accepted norms. Now we also have e-mail, Web, SMS, courier pick-up and toll-free numbers, through which customers can reach the service provider. Each of these response modes should provide the same information. Hence all channels of customer interaction should be integrated with the single customer account to create a uniform and dependable customer-communication system. In addition, each method must be secure and reliable to guard against loss of communication.

Offer Value-adds to Corporates

Value-added billing services can help today’s corporate customers greatly. In particular, they may appreciate:

• Availability of an itemized bill on the Web
• An electronic copy of the bill
• Ability to assign cost codes to phone call usage
• One bill for multiple lines
• A comparison of costs of different plans, and the flexibility of choosing the best one
• Ability to better manage and understand their calling patterns and their expense on telephony services

Seek Customer Feedback

We talk of the customer all the time, but without his participation. Service providers should try to engage the customer in a dialog and proactively seek his or her feedback. Customers know best about their needs and are also willing to share it. Automated tools can be used to capture and classify their feedback into meaningful and significant business insights.

Ankur Lal is the CEO of Infozech Software./ Ankur Dhingra is a telecom analyst with the same company.