VOIP Billing System – Learn The Fundamentals Of The BSS/OSS
Telecom companies have a lot of things going for them. You have the traditional voice along with data services and now television and mobile cellular services. As a customer, people can now enjoy bundled services at lower rates and with better service. With all these myriad services rolling out, how does the ISP ensure that everything is accounted for? This is where VOIP Billing System becomes vital.
In voice services, things look very straight forward and we have standardized rates almost everywhere with unlimited local calling. But a simple service like phone can have other complexities like long distance charges and local number portability wherein you switch operators and want to retain the number, among other things. These may not look daunting, but they are vital for the ISP to remain profitable. Robust billing systems can track these and bill accordingly.
The more modern solutions, like cellular services, have even more complexities in offerings. In developed nations, the introduction of 3G services has meant that mobile networks are now being used for both voice and data services. The rates for both are different and so are their usages. In the developing nations, there are multiple short term and long term plans for plain 2G voice services too. The billing systems need to address all these variations.
While the importance of telecom billing solutions is clear, their deployment needs to be looked at in more detail. There are many aspects of a proper billing solution that need to be considered. A standard billing solution will encompass everything from hardware to customer support – the complete cycle.
The most basic requirement for a billing solution is the hardware, a system that can run the BSS/OSS. The next, obviously, is the software itself. The software has to be good enough to scale to a large number of customers and flexible enough to handle various service offerings. The next item is the billing cycles. Most billing solutions allow for a certain number of billing cycles where the usage is billed in bulk processing. ISPs need to finalize how many cycles per month and when to have them.
Another equally important part of the billing solution is distributing the bills to the customers and collecting their payments. The bill distribution can be the traditional printed bills or the newer online bills. Either way, the bill information needs to reach the user well in advance. The next step is to facilitate the collection of bill payments. Drop boxes, auto payments, tie ups with banks and online are some options.
The final spoke in the billing solution wheel is the billing inquiry support system. Customers can be billed incorrectly due to errors from the ISP or software problems. Alternative, the customer can interpret the bills incorrectly. Whatever the problem, the issue need a resolution. The customer care department need to address these.
All in all, telecom billing OSS is vital for modern telecom services providers. With the varied customer requirements and market demands of variations in plans, a robust billing system is mandatory to track usage, bill customers and collect payments. As an ISP, the whole telecom billing OSS has to be well thought of and just investing in software is not enough.
Tags: bss/oss, oss software, telecom billing system, telecom oss, VOIP Billing, voip billing system