Quack

Those pricing people at Telstra continue to impress me with their cleverness when it comes to innovative and customer-friendly pricing changes … pause … NOT! (I just see Borat Movie; I like).

You just need to know a few small facts about voicemail calling patterns (more…)

History not only tells us of what happened in the past, it is a good indicator of what can happen in the future, especially for those prepared to learn.

In the early 1980’s, IBM released its new invention called the Personal Computer, the IBM PC. At the time, IBM did not regard it important enough to protect the intellectual property of its bus architecture nor its operating system (more…)

Since one of the best places to read a blog is on your mobile device, I have enabled a WAP version of this blog for your convenience. Just put mobile.quack.net.au into your WAP browser and quack away.

I like nothing more than mining through the millions of CDRs that we collect and process on behalf of our Partners (actually, I do like more than that, but some things are beyond the scope of this blog). It’s like playing a jigsaw puzzle - sorting through lots of small pieces of information to discover a bigger picture.

There are a few fairly simple trends that I have observed. Call rates continue to trend down, but this is more than made up for by (more…)

As the saying goes, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Because billing for new products can be so difficult, we tend to use whatever tools are available to get the job done.

At a recent industry conference, a speaker used the term “content apathy”; she was referring to the lack of exciting new content products that we can all use our fancy mobile handsets to access. Again, the barrier in many cases is the complexity of billing and integration of these products.

This is how I feel when it comes to (more…)

We’ve just had one Partner (the Billing Bureau word for “customer”) recently merge an acquired customer base into their retail billing environment, with another two of them recently announcing acquisitions, so the topic of billing migrations is high on my mind. While there is not a lot of consolidation at the bigger end of town, there has been a reasonable activity of this nature among smaller CSPs and ISPs.

The first one went very smoothly indeed. The Partner used (more…)

Pretty soon, this great nation of ours will be stopped by a horse race. The office is pretty quiet (closed, actually), and call volumes for the day will be down an average of 30%. I’m not one for the whole horse thing. The allure of betting on smelly, four-legged creatures really has not captured me.

When I bet, I prefer to do so on team sports played by two-legged creatures capable of cognitive thought, and where (more…)

At the IIR Billing & Revenue Assurance conference this week, we enjoyed a fantastic presentation from the NT Power & Water Corporation, who implemented a new billing system that went … well, not very well.

Many customers were billed incorrectly and the media went absolutely crazy over the “scandal”, so in addition to fixing the problems (more…)