1. Customer Service and Billing Hubs
Implementation issues and Business benefits for
Communications Service Providers
EXECUTIVE BRIEF

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This edition published March 2012
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3. Table of Contents
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
The next goal – what the customer wants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Planning a single view solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
An added challenge – keeping up with developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Deciding on the solution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
Getting the Board on board – a case study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ……………...9
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4. Executive Summary
For several years there has been a trend in the communications industry towards achieving a single view of the customer.
Most operators will claim to have this capability, whether they got there through seamless and elegant integration and
consolidation projects or whether they got there through a series of bolt on solutions and a lot of technical work-arounds.
Sometimes it is better not to ask.
The crucial issue is that to achieve any level of customer visibility and understanding means combining disparate data
sources reflecting the many types of transaction, interaction and relationship an organisation has with their customers.
This need for data integration means juggling with changing data sources from different and ever changing operational
systems all in different formats and being able to manage and monitor the acquisition process without impacting the
function of the operational systems. For all the investment made in acquiring data its value is only as good as its
accessibility.
The next goal – what the customer wants
Having achieved the goal of greater customer visibility and while the industry begins to believe that it is ready for the
deluge of data that is on the way, we should spare a thought for the customer.
Is it not time that customers get a single view of all their services? Not just consumers but, importantly and urgently, the
large corporates that account for the majority of most operators’ profits. Leveraging their experience of billing customers
for small amounts based on a variety of criteria, operators have an opportunity to become billing ‘hubs’ – as long as
operators can extract and manage many different data formats.
Take as an example a Large Global Corporation (LGC) which manufactures and distributes sugar and synthetic sugary
products. It has operations around the world. It is a large Telco customer and uses the services of a number of
Communications Service Providers ( CSP’s ), although its prime contract is with a major European carrier. Although vital
to its business, LGC’s telecoms bill is about one percent of its bill for raw materials - but it still runs into the millions.
Because its telecoms bill is such a small line item, there is simply no incentive for it to delay payment, argue incessantly
about costs and generally be anything except fully co-operative with its CSP’s. Conversely, LGC is a significant customer
for the European CSP.
The Telecoms Manager at LGC used to dream of accurate bills but now understands that none of his telecoms bills will be
100% accurate, they never have been and probably never will be. He does not mind, up to a point. He also used to dream
that his CSP would keep track of the inventory in use – and more importantly not in use – in his company.
His recurring dream is about the invoice format and he still believes that one day it will match his internal audit system.
Sometimes he is tempted to believe that this dream is coming true. If he could view his bill in the same format that he uses
to analyse it, his job would be easier, his auditing faster and his sign off quicker. After all, his job is far more complex than
it was even five years ago. Now employees want smartphones and iPads (current research indicates that 20% of all CXOs
now use them) and his job is more and more about control and cost management. He needs to find ways of defining
personal usage as opposed to company usage and somehow get the sales guys to abide by the rules. He is concerned
about the trend of mobile payments and carrier billing and suddenly having to deal with a host of mobile online
transactions that should be posted under subsistence or entertainment, not telecoms. He also needs to manage multiple
sources and multiple uses of data, for a global workforce.
One of his more recent dreams is, he believes, beginning to become a reality. To have one view of all his services, one
console through which he can place orders and monitor and track trouble tickets for all these services - as supplied by a
host of different global and local operators around the world. This would make his life so much better.
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5. Planning a single view solution The biggest issue is possibly the different numbers of
Leaving the Telecoms Manager to dream and his platforms, formats and product descriptions that will be
salesmen to blur the lines between corporate and used across the range of operators and service providers;
personal smartphone usage, it is worth just assessing with many of them changing definition constantly.
the challenges involved in designing an integrated
reporting system for corporate customers. The number of Customer Service and Billing platforms
creates a huge challenge in data extraction, conversion
This new challenge for the CSP is set against a and transformation. A host of different formats will be in use
background of huge subscriber growth, new products, at operators around the world. From Flat Files to
mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and the Unstructured Word, Excel and PDF documents and Semi
knowledge that mergers often result in systems that structured data such as ASN.1 based CDR’s to complex
are not compatible. The customer has defined a new XML network data files, it must all be extracted, converted
opportunity for the CSP, not just articulated a step and loaded into a customer friendly environment. The
forward in its customer experience. challenge of on-boarding or connecting new data sources
and then managing and monitoring the data transfer
The list of objectives and challenges can be process cannot be underestimated. When time means
summarized as: money linking in your customers and getting access to the
data suppliers is critical to do accurately and swiftly,
Objectives however the opportunity makes this investment worthwhile.
 Provide a simple, single source for The impact of regulatory compliance needs careful
corporate customers to view and analyse all management. Not only do individual countries have their
service usage, orders, trouble tickets, etc. own rules, particularly when it comes to electronic billing,
that are provided directly or through partners but there are also pan European and US regulations that
 Find a method of extracting, converting and need to be complied with. Some countries now insist that all
transferring large amounts of differently bills from all companies pass through Government systems
formatted data, globally. in order for the authorities to understand how much tax they
 Secure the CSP’s position as prime billing are owed.
and service provider
 Cement partnerships with other operators The number of different services is now a problem for IT,
and service providers for future billing particularly billing. Fixed, mobile, IP, LBS services are now
service provider business delivering unprecedented amounts and variety of data. A
 Develop a strategy to address the massive Tier 1 CSP can gather over four billion network metrics an
increase in data, usage and business (M2M, hour. This huge amount of data drags with it multiple tool
Internet and Location based data sources) kits of analytics to make sure that the content is delivered;
 Ensure the solution scales and is flexible that the network is operating at its optimum and now that
enough to manage the ever changing the customers are being offered the services that they want.
multitude of different data sources and
formats Any issues with Security compliance mean customers will
 Provide an interactive invoicing format that simply not use any compromised service and any lapses
mimics customers’ internal systems will mean massive decreases in corporate confidence and
revenue. Therefore visible security management, access
control and auditability are prerequisites of any customer
data integration solution.
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6. Challenges
 Managing different data formats for almost every billing and related customer support system
 Extracting and standardizing this data into a single, usable format
 Increasing range of services and subsequent huge scale of data to manage
 Differing languages, currencies, tax regimes
 Regulatory Compliance and Security – at local, national and international levels
 Different IT platforms across partners, even within its own properties
 No universal or centralized product catalogue, therefore no standard product definition
 Smartphones and tablet usage driving data heavy content usage
An added challenge – keeping up with developments
No-one would claim that the communications market is standing still. The momentum of new, primarily data,
services is threatening to overwhelm the capacity of networks. Smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the
amount and type of data carried by mobile networks. Network analytics tools are being deployed almost
universally in an attempt to manage network capacity and configuration more efficiently. This is happening
alongside a similar trend in customer usage analytics. Whilst these tools are being deployed to manage the
growth in traffic, the side effect is the potential to improve the customer experience exponentially.
Alongside the growth in ‘human’ communications is the rise of machine–to-machine communications. Now that
Man is on the way to connecting everyone on earth, he is now embarking on the journey to connect everything
as well. The potential for those who do the connecting - and more importantly the provisioning, maintaining and
reporting of those devices - to make entirely new and very profitable businesses out of the opportunity cannot
be under-estimated.
The machine-to-machine market for corporates is already a large, diverse market. The potential for monitoring,
tracking and reporting on a host of devices is almost limitless. Everything from fleet management, security, ID
verification, virtual lunch vouchers, travel and accommodation could be sold to corporate customers – and
therefore must be scoped in any solution that involves providing the single point of view of multiple data sources
that the customer now requires.
Deciding on the solution
With such a variety of systems, formats and technologies, the only real solution is to extract the data from each
system and then input that data into a single view solution. Integrating these operational platforms for customer
intelligence lacks flexibility is hugely complex, impacts the operational systems performance and simply doesn’t
work. Even within one CSP group there are simply too many different systems and formats. To integrate the
amount of data from this many different sources and different formats – from text, ASN.1, relational and non-
relational databases - would require years of work. The key is to integrate the data not the operational systems
and provide automated management and monitoring.
Against this challenge of huge complexity and investment lies the universal customer imperative. Customers,
whether large corporates or impoverished teenagers, need simplicity, clarity and transparency from their service
provider.
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7. From both a cost saving and revenue generating point of view,
the opportunity of providing a single view console that allowed
customers to keep track of trouble tickets, verify bills and place
orders - which in itself would go a long way to solving the
problems with manual order entry – is too compelling to ignore. Poor data integrity has been a longstanding
CSP’s, whatever the press may say, are good at billing large problem in carrier environments that leads to
amounts of small and complex transactions. This means that inefficiencies and expensive manual re-work
the solution can be rolled out as a global, interactive billing and across the full range of operations such as
customer service hub, linking multiple supply points into a provisioning and activation, service
single source. assurance, billing and capacity planning.
Historically seen as a problem for operations,
The spins off benefits are improved cash flow by delivering bills data is now seen as the fuel of an
in a standard format that matches customers’ in-house formats. organization, fuel that can help the
It would also enable increased revenue from the ability to resell organization get the most out of its customer
this core business expertise and solution. information engines, or clog and choke that
engine. For this reason, the data must be
accurate, timely and accessible. To make
Getting the Board on board – a case this work, it is vital that incoming data be it
study from the network or partners must be
monitored, managed and in a format that can
Two years ago a VP of Billing and Revenue Assurance was
be analysed not just as a feed for an
appointed at a global carrier whose customers were exclusively
operational system. Data is the key
corporate. His initial role was to consolidate the number of
differentiator in many successful
billing systems. Before he arrived he studied the business. His
organisations but no matter what investment
initial assessment of the situation at the company was that too
is only as good as its accessibility.
little emphasis was being placed on the customer and the
customer experience, the company was still too technology
focused, whatever the press releases said. In addition, he
realized that customers had no end-to-end view of the services
they were buying.
His first goal was to get Billing on the agenda at Board
Meetings. He did this by showing that the company’s largest
customers put Billing in the top three issues that they had. He
made Billing into the bridge between the customer and the
Board. He then made Billing a company-wide issue. His
argument was that billing was about data integrity and about
giving customers the best overall experience possible, which
required integration of multiple sources of data.
By getting the CEO on board, and using the customer and his
requirements as tools, the VP of Billing and Revenue
Assurance achieved his goals of reduced bad debt, increased
cash flow and cost savings within half the time agreed at the
outset of his tenure. He never achieved a stated goal of
consolidating the number of systems down to one – which
turned out to be a good thing, but made Billing and Revenue
Assurance a key element in increasing customer satisfaction
and even as part of the new product development.
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8. Conclusions
Providing customers, whether Corporate or Residential, information in the format they want rather than the
format that is most convenient to provide them with increases customer satisfaction, retention and ultimately
profitability. To create a global customer service and billing hub for large corporate customers, the solution
needs to be able to extract and convert, at scale, a huge range of third party data, in online or batch mode. It
needs to be able to scale to the needs of truly global companies and be able to manage and monitor these
volumes of data. It needs to act as an information - specifically billing - hub, which can receive and send data
from anywhere to anywhere, enable data transformation from any to any format and must be able to include a
range of billing and customer service information. It needs to build and maintain a universal library of predefined
transformation routines that would be able to deal with the most common formats and use them as reusable
building blocks in any new project.
To provide customers with what they want is always an excellent goal – to fulfill their dreams more so. To create
a global opportunity out of the core CSP strength of billing and extending this to create a billing service provider
for global customers is surely a compelling conversation to have at the next Board meeting.
About the Author
Alex Leslie - Founder and CEO of the Global Billing Association (GBA), a trade body focused on the
communications sector (Now part of the TM Forum). During the 10 years of the GBA as an independent
association, he guided it through times of enormous change, challenge and opportunity for the communications
industry. He has actively provided a focus on the changing business models facing the industry, delivering
thought leadership, insight and direction. Contributing Editor, OSS/BSS for Connected Planet and Publisher of
BillingViews.
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9. About Informatica B2B Data Exchange and
Transformation
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About Informatica
Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA) is the world’s number one independent leader in data
integration software. The Informatica Platform provides organizations with a comprehensive,
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Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be tradenames or
trademarks of their respective owners. First Published: March 2012
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