As businesses look to amalgamate their network services under one umbrella, and given the rise of VoIP and other internet-based connectivity, network providers and resellers have been challenged to create simple user-facing management tools.
Take Control of your Billing
The driving factor behind this may be that decision-makers and those responsible for budgets require more control over services, that are becoming increasingly integral to day-to-day operation, and finding methods to minimise costs and maximise efficiency is becoming a regular request to resellers.
Existing practices usually use traditional on-site billing systems that require computers that may run over night or through weekends to compile all the data required for a bill run but these are plagued with issues. Keeping your information secure and available in a timely manner can be expensive and ultimately doesn’t offer the best user experience for clients. No-one wants an overnight wait to make an adjustment to their bills!
Cloud-based Billing
The emergence of Cloud-based portals has proven to be even more popular due to the nature of them being off-site and the additional features they can deliver whilst updates are remote and automatic. By integrating the main networks’ API’s into a user-facing cloud solution, with added controls for networks providers and resellers, Tekton believes the benefits of a cloud-based billing portal far outweigh the traditional approach.
Cloud-based portals, like Zoey help increase accuracy and efficiency by taking the work away from on-site computers and pushing it to the Cloud. For example, Zoey automatically imports call data every hour without any prompt from the supplier. This helps ensure the CDR data received is accurate and is imported in time for any last-minute bill runs.
Accessing Data
A modern billing platform should ensure that the data is available 24/7 so that the end-user has the flexibility to log-in whenever they require updates rather than being limited to office hours. The nature of business operations has changed and your billing provider should be able to demonstrate that they are moving with you.
Ensuring Security
Varying permissions should be permittable in order that users can have the correct level of access without business owners worrying that they could make dramatic and inappropriate adjustments to tariffs and client pricing. Billing, by its very nature, can be responsible for increasing margins for a business but it can be very costly when errors are made. For this reason, Zoey also records all changes and who made them; whether that be supplier or end-user, so that an audit trail can be checked and the party who made the changes can be identified.
Business software should aim to give control back to the user so they can perform tasks that would otherwise be manual. This ultimately creates happier resellers that stress less about billing and their clients are reassured that their invoices are taken care of by a professional and experienced team.
