No More Billing Nightmares

Can your telecommunications company's billing system consolidate charges from a vast array of different services--including content from a variety of third-party providers--into one bill for your customers while at the same time offering transparency into new revenue-generating opportunities? Sun and CSG Systems offer a solution with as much performance, flexibility, and scalability as you'll ever need.

Engineers and computer experts have a tried-and-true (if grammatically incorrect) rule of thumb: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

However, when you're dealing with technology, something can be functionally broken and still appear to be performing as usual, that is, good enough to get the job done. But "good enough" just isn't enough for the dynamic telecommunications industry, which is engaged in a perpetual effort to increase average revenue per user, sign on new customers, and offer advanced data services.

By now, analyst proclamations that service providers are sure to prosper by offering customers a diverse bundle of services—voice, messaging, ring tones, video, data transfer, information, entertainment, and more—are a familiar refrain.

The difficulty often arises when it comes time to bill for those wide-ranging services. Simple flat-rate billing is no longer the rule. Options include pay as you go, monthly subscription fees, prepaid plans, premium bundles, discount promotions, introductory deals, and more. Meanwhile, the more content carriers offer, the more content partners they have, adding even greater complexity to the billing-management process. Carriers must then track the revenue associated with each content transaction and content partner.

How do carriers know if their billing solutions are up to the task?

Here's another rule of thumb: If a billing system can't keep up with growth, if it doesn't allow you to unlock new revenue opportunities while getting the most out of existing offerings, and if it doesn't help you retain subscribers and attract new ones, then it's not good enough.

Many Services, One Bill

Analyst firm IDC predicts that 2004 will be known for "the battle of bundles." When consumers compare communication service packages from local phone companies, long-distance phone providers, and cable outfits, according to IDC, 49 percent of U.S. households will choose the provider that offers one bill. Only 32 percent of households will choose the package that offers cost savings alone.

"Although we are seeing preliminary evidence that bundling is an effective strategy to sell more services to the household, effective execution will be critical to the success of this strategy," says Wu Zhou, a research analyst in IDC's residential communications group. "Consumers are increasingly demanding the convenience benefits of having one bill."

Introducing new and innovative services—and keeping billing accurate and simple—requires a flexible system that allows carriers to bill for single-use services and subscriptions, as well as voice and data, on a pre- or postpaid basis.

A billing system isn't merely for collecting revenue anymore. It's now central to the business, allowing carriers to collect information that can be used to generate new revenue and keep customers loyal. Consolidated billing offers the only chance at meeting this objective.

Real-World Solution, Real-World Benefits

Sun Microsystems and CSG Systems offer a consolidated billing solution optimized for the Sun platform that simplifies the complexity inherent in managing a modern telecommunications firm. The result is a billing system that's flexible, scalable, and lightning fast—a solution that allows Sun and CSG Systems' mutual customers to meet the current and evolving needs of their own customers and content partners easily, effectively, and efficiently.

"This solution is about blending Sun's practice and skills at consolidating IT infrastructure with CSG's capabilities in converging legacy and heterogeneous billing systems through its well-known solution, Kenan FX," says Vincent Bic of Sun. "Kenan FX allows telecommunication service providers to drive their costs down while addressing their customers' requirement for unified billing. And it enables new and broader revenue opportunities by supporting bundled services on a single bill."

The CSG Data Mediation solution captures and correlates usage and transaction data about any type of service offering from any type of network, and then distributes the relevant data to various downstream applications such as billing, fraud detection, and customer care. Meanwhile, CSG Kenan/BP and CSG Kenan Prepaid enable service providers to simultaneously manage multiple balances associated with a single customer and multiple concurrent transactions against a single balance in real time—and provide one bill for all services.

By capturing that information in one data store, service providers also get a complete snapshot of each customer, facilitating highly targeted promotions such as cross-service discounts and uncovering new sources of revenue. Carriers could boost revenue significantly, for example, by converting prepaid subscribers who pay for voice service only to a bundle of services for a few dollars more per month.

Last but not least, consolidation simplifies customer care operations: one customer, one bill, one profile.

"A service provider's total spend for customer care and billing should be between 2 and 4 percent of revenue," says Geoff Prior, CSG vice president of sales operations and marketing. "If a service provider finds itself at the high end or above this range, if it is sending multiple invoices to individual or corporate subscribers, or if it faces a capital budgeting decision necessary to support new service offerings, the provider should certainly investigate the benefits of billing consolidation."

The scalability of the Kenan/BP solution underscores its cost advantages. In a test carried out using real-life billing scenarios, Kenan/BP—running on a Sun Fire 15K server with three domains, 288 GB of memory, and 72 UltraSPARC III processors at 1.2 GHz—generated 1 million residential bills per hour or 500,000 wireless bills per hour, exceeding the requirements of even the largest service providers. In other words, carriers don't have to worry about outgrowing this solution.

"Business support systems represent around 25 percent of all IT spending for the telecommunications industry," notes Sun's Bic. "Consolidation makes billing operations far less complex and requires less employee time, yielding an important cost-saving opportunity for carriers. That, combined with the opportunity of better understanding customers' needs and behavior, makes consolidated billing a wise investment."