Wed 11 Oct 2006
I often think that good telco billing systems are the strong silent type. While they sit in the background quietly doing their job, they are a near ‘invisible’ part of the industry. Yes, telco billing systems are one of those things that you don’t notice… until something goes wrong!
However, when billing systems go bad customers get upset and the media spotlight can be difficult to avoid. Over the years telco billing system failures have been responsible for court cases and questions raised in Parliament, not to mention a lot of unhappy customers!
A few months ago, criticism of Vodafone’s billing project alleged that it was running late with huge cost overruns. What a surprise! How could this be? A 50% cost blow-out? And all this for a system that just produces phone bills. How hard could that be anyway?
Oh for a dollar for every time someone’s asked me a question like that.
Telco billing is hard. Damn hard. All those CDRs, all those rate plans, all that processing. On the billing scale of complexity, telco is right up the top. We run billing environments with some of the wildest schemes anyone could think of, all in the name of acquiring and keeping customers. Come to think of it, we have probably contributed to this by helping our partners design these very plans.
And that’s just the billing side. High-end billing systems (like the one referred to in the Vodafone article) are usually composed of many systems: mediation, CRM, financials, OSS and, oh yes, billing. And whatever you spend on all of those individual systems, you at least spend again putting them together!
Yes, it’s a complex world in which we live, and it’s only going to become more so. We are sitting on the edge of an explosion in the number and types of services offered over mobile phones – including mobile TV and internet, new content and m-commerce applications.
However, as the world becomes more complex, customers are demanding more and more simplicity and transparency in their telco billing.
Often the simplest and best-presented bill you see has the most complexity sitting behind it. As we move towards the future, the trick is going to be to keep the complexity in the billing system and out of the bill.
October 11th, 2006 at 9:56 am
As someone who as worked with the myriad of interconnecting cobbled together systems that Telstra own, I am watching the latest high flying efforts to come up with a “best of breed” billing system with great interest. The problem is as I see it, the solutions proposed are half baked, lacking some vital ingrediants and will end up more than likely with egg on some peoples faces. Unfortunately not the scrooges who run the joint (I fear) but some dewy eyed little consultants brought in to do the actual work. (The ones who you will find flocking around all big projects.) The problems at Telstra are systematic and until the top level of management is cleaned out (dare I say filleted) the situation will remain the same.
October 13th, 2006 at 8:24 am
On a regular basis, the large carriers seem to spend huge $$$ on projects to redo and unify their billing systems. We will never know how much Telstra spent on Flexcabs. The fact that they have to keep doing this on a regular basis is surely an indication that they are not getting it right, despite the billions of dollars being spent!
November 2nd, 2006 at 8:43 am
Figures in excess of $200 Million were regularly thrown around Telstra as the rough costs to fix flexcab. No one knows what it is worth.
The problem with Flexcabs is that it is old, tired and the data is verifiably wrong in a huge percentage of cases. Because of it’s design, a pricing file has to be updated every time a customer adds / changes plans. These files “update” the cutomer records, in theory. It gets interesting for “nested” customers like a Government department, where (in theory) pricing should “flow down” from the top level to each sub-department / division. But if there have been multiple changes there is a cascade effect, where one broken link or piece of data just flows through. Then the accepted practice is not to fix the master records, but band-aid each sub record. Thats ok until the next change,,,,,,,,,:-)
The system is a mess.
May 4th, 2011 at 12:32 pm
Great common sense here. Wish Id thguoht of that.