Late landing call data has proved a headache for billing platforms over the decades, given the batch-processed nature of traditional billing systems that may have to work overnight to perform an invoice run. If any CDR is late to the batch and doesn’t get included, it can create problems for billers to accurately charge for those calls.
Usually this involves re-rating next month’s invoice but that can consume costly man-hours and doesn’t lend to a professional reputation as your effectively admitting your system isn’t up to the task of accurately billing your customers.
Pushing costs to the next month has its own drawbacks; closed bills are legal documents and if you’re affected by late landing call data, your bills won’t be an accurate reflection of your client’s usage. By rolling over late CDR you increase the chance of your clients experiencing ‘bill shock’ too, which isn’t great for customer service scores and if repeated, can affect the reputation of the business and possibly revenue if customers decide to leave because of inaccurate bills and unexpected charges. Also, international customers may find that exchange rates fluctuate through the ‘delayed month’ and therefore may be over-charged or the supplier could possibly lose money, depending on whether the exchange rate rises or falls.
Best Practices
Best practices also dictate, when considering a billing system purchase, that businesses buy systems that are more powerful than they require to prevent occasional bottlenecks, just in case the business ever experiences unexpected high volume runs. This extra expense will hardly ever, if at all, be used and therefore doesn’t represent good value for the money invested.
Rather than reactively dealing with issues when they arise and using antiquated systems that don’t work to their maximum efficiency, modern billing systems like Tekton’s Zoey, apply a more proactive approach supported by cloud-based portals, available anywhere, anytime.
Benefits of a Cloud-based Billing Platform
By keeping data off-site and available through the cloud, businesses can reduce up-front costs on bulky IT hardware and back-up solutions whilst maximising time spent on day-to-day tasks, instead of waiting for long billing runs to complete. Zoey provides real-time hourly updates to users and suppliers therefore businesses have a complete and accurate picture of their usage whenever required, even at home. Whilst suppliers could consider rate changes and can run bill runs easily, without having to wait for huge amounts of data to be processed through a single on-site system.
The fact is, late landing call data is only a problem for traditional systems, so why use them? Tekton have over 100 years industry experience and provides complete solutions to help suppliers and resellers bring carrier grade billing to their clients.
