Our Sponsors
FAQs and the experience of Billing Managers
Alex Leslie - Jun 25, 09:22 AM
Over the past year BillingViews has interviewed many operators and has collected a wealth of knowledge about what really makes a Billing Manager laugh, cry and cancel his weekends.
Many of the answers and opinions were similar and this article provides a summary of these insights.
In a survey of operators we asked ‘what is the biggest barrier to next generation billing’ (however it is defined in your company)?
Not surprisingly the single biggest answer was ‘legacy systems’ but much more surprising was the second, which was ‘lack of understanding of the business benefits’. When we did the survey again – amongst a conference audience – the ‘lack of understanding’ answer became equal to the ‘legacy systems’ answer in importance. This means that either there is no clear and solid line of communication between Billing and the Board or that people are not articulating the business case well enough.
One operator summed up the situation perfectly:
“I want to answer everything except ‘technology’ but I guess the key one is ‘lack of understanding of the business benefits’. If we could get the business benefits clear we could convince senior management and build the business case to support a budget big enough to deal with the problems presented by the legacy systems.”
This begs the question ‘how do you build a business case for a big transformation?
From the feedback BillingViews got, the answer is clear – ‘cash and customers’.
Actually the most effective and successful transformation programmes are those that are started by the CEO or another member of the board. The second most successful are those that has a board sponsor but not simply a ‘name on the door’, the sponsor must be someone who is prepared to champion the cause, settle political arguments (always the biggest problem with transformations) and get actively involved.
Cash gets attention in two ways – one is by creating an argument for reducing cost. This may be the consolidation of separate, older systems onto one newer platform – cutting out the need for separate licences, different skills, training, hardware and upgrade management. The second way is via cash flow – a case for improving cash flow and reducing debt through clearer billing, promotion of e-billing and a reduction of a few days in credit terms will (or should) all get attention at a decision making level.
Customers are also powerful arguments for a business case. Largely because so much hype has been created around the customer experience (some of it perhaps more than hype) the CEO will worry about his customers. He will wonder if he is losing them and if they are happy or unhappy. If Billing can provide an argument that they can support Marketing, help the customers understand the products and services better, provide an easy way to upgrade or change a pricing plan and generally have a better experience then the arguments will be compelling. Although it might seem difficult to get figures on the impact on the customer of improving billing there are benchmarks out there that will definitely help. The one that is most valuable is this: “what percentage of in-bound calls are related to billing?” Finding the answer to that, doing some root cause analysis to make sure you know what the percentage is when you have excluded network problems (missing CDRs) for example – can help enormously.
Once the business case is approved and the transformation begins the next question is ‘what is the most difficult thing about transformations?’
The operators we asked were divided on this one – some said that maintaining parity is the main difficulty, i.e making sure that nothing appears different to the customer while you are, as one operator put it, ‘performing heart surgery while removing limbs’. There is no easy answer to this – it is difficult – but the best advice is to spend a lot more time defining the processes before you start than you think you will need to. It is also about communicating with the customer, managing expectations and explaining the benefits of the new regime.
Others found that their biggest challenge was keeping all the stakeholders within the company happy. There is plenty of advice out there on how to deal with this. The most common idea is to get all the constituents involved as early as possible (for example, there is nothing worse than getting Finance’s feedback at the last minute, particularly if they feel they have been left out of the process)! Once you have this feedback, be as ruthless as you can in keeping them out of the way while you do the important work – and use your sponsor to help.
Communication is also critical in the ‘stakeholder happiness’ challenge. Many successful transformations have branded the project, giving it a name and an identity. They have produced newsletters and hosted conference calls and seminars to set expectations, to communicate how the project is going and explain the benefits for various parts of the business. If things are getting behind or something is going wrong, you must take charge of the communication. There is nothing worse than the Board discovering things are not going to plan themselves – if this happens ‘everyone becomes a billing expert’ and things get more and more difficult.
In the next article:- RFPs – who needs them; focus groups; whether you should use a transformation project as an opportunity to change bill formats or processes and what makes and IT Manager laugh.
The Latest News 
Purchases via iPad worth 20pc more
06 Sep 2010
shoppers using the iPad for purchases has increased exponentially since the device’s release in April, and the average sale generates significantly more revenue
Phone sales up
16 Aug 2010
Worldwide mobile device sales to end users totalled 325.6 million units in Q2, up 13.8 percent from the same period in 2009, according to a study by Gartner
Mobile data revenues up
11 Aug 2010
Mobile data service revenues in the US reached USD 13.2 billion in the second quarter, up 6 percent from Q1 and up 22 percent from a year earlier