In order to ensure a smooth and streamlined billing process, your business needs an effective telecoms billing system. Despite this, the billing experience is often overlooked as a potential area to create competitive advantage.
In actual fact, an effective billing system can help differentiate your business and add value. This is why we started our ‘Value Add of Billing’ series, showcasing how a telecoms billing system can increase sales, reduce costs and even optimise margins.
In this post, we focus on how you can increase productivity through your telecoms billing system. With the right feature-set, including self-serve functionality, automation and bulk data management, you can improve productivity, enhance efficiency and increase accuracy. This means you and your team can spend more time on the important tasks.
How to increase productivity through your telecoms billing system
Self-Serve Functionality
Self-serve functionality is an area that we regularly focus on – with reason! Customers value the ability to have access to real-time information, personalised alerting and transparent billing practices. Furthermore, allowing your customers to check their own usage and set limits on spend and data drastically reduces the number of your support calls. All those quick questions can be answered within the platform by the user.
As your support team has less calls to take, they can focus their time on more complex issues delivering a better level of service and reducing ‘time to resolution’. That time could also be used for further training or other internal projects.
While other platforms are still playing catch up, ZOEY has allowed resellers to offer online bill delivery, rich analysis, spend capping, usage and bundle alerting, estate management, and even real-time SIM swaps and call barring through its self-service customer portal, since inception.
Finally, it is important to note that self-serve functions are now a must! Back in December ’21, Ofcom amended their General Conditions to require resellers to provide end-users with the ability to check their usage, spend and invoices online. As such, the real advantage comes with the range of self-serve functionality provided by your billing platform.
Bulk Management of Data
Many legacy billing platforms only allow users to manage their data on a one-by-one basis. This can be fiddly and time consuming. By contrast, our ZOEY platform uses a wizard-led, modern, clean and easy-to-use interface that enables users to bulk remove and replace services, all in just a few clicks.
We have enhanced our batch and bulk update functionalities to cover billable services, cost centres, usernames and contract end-dates, alongside the more typical bulk changes (product, add-ons, ratings, bars etc). What may take hundreds of clicks on another billing platform, only takes a couple through ZOEY.
These efficiencies not only increase productivity and reduce billing overheads, they also take human error out of the equation, resulting in more accurate bills and better cashflow.
Another good example of this benefit is with yearly RPI increases. With our bulk update functionalities, we can update RPI changes for our partners free of charge in a matter of minutes!
Bureau Billing Service
Another way businesses can increase their efficiency is by adopting a bureau billing service. This takes the strains and complications out of performing your own bill runs.
The level of service included within the bureau billing service differs across billing providers. At Tekton Billing, we offer one of the most comprehensive bureau billing services in the channel. This is a fully managed and hands-off experience. We can control the day-to-day maintenance so that you can focus on the commercial side, with ability to have as much, or as little, control as you want.
The Tekton team are always on-hand to answer any questions that arise and assist during the bill run process to ensure invoices are produced and distributed in a timely and efficient manner.
“My GO-TO for Telecoms & IT billing in the industry. As a consultant within the Telco space, many projects include rolling out billing infrastructure. Tekton is always my provider of choice. Their Bureau service is essential for fast-growing resellers and the support you receive from this outfit is exceptional. The product is ahead of the game in many aspects too!” Telco Consultant
Intelligent Reporting and Automation
Telecoms billing is awash with data, from which valuable insights can be learnt. However, the right platform is required to translate and visualise this data into actionable insights.
Some platforms are guilty of dumping reams of raw data, giving the illusion that there’s easy access to lots of information. In reality, this raw data tells us very little, and even if you’re exporting data and manipulating it in an external system like Excel, then you’re wasting precious time.
Visualisation and comprehension, rather than raw data, is key. ZOEY’s revolutionary business intelligence reporting and margin analysis suite help resellers identify loss-making services, unallocated services and high-margin charges.
In addition, ZOEY automates many of the processes required to ensure a time-efficient bill run that maximises revenue. With hourly, automatic CDR imports, you’ll never miss a CDR or spend valuable time collecting them manually ever again. It also reduces the risk of human errors accidentally affecting the raw data.
Any loss-making services need to be resolved before invoices are billed. ZOEY’s ‘Unallocated Usage’ tab alerts billers to any imported CDRs that cannot be billed. It also allows Admins to easily understand the cause with clear reasons and wizard-based functions designed around specific scenarios, for quick resolution. This enables resellers to be proactive, not reactive!
Finally, ZOEY helps billers become more proactive with a range of automated reports. Admins can keep a vigilant eye on margins, usage, spend and more, using whichever metric (percentage, currency value, M-o-M change etc.) is most appropriate. This is an incredibly cost and time efficient way to highlight accounts that may be ripe for upselling to a higher bandwidth or data cap.
Contract Management Suite
Occasionally, you have to let customers go and making this process as smooth as possible ensures a positive lasting impression. Using ZOEY’s in-built contract management suite, billing managers can save time calculating Early Termination Fees (EFTs). ZOEY will automatically calculate and display the remaining contract value, meaning a quick resolution if the customer does decide to terminate the service.
Summary
Overall, an effective telecoms billing system can help streamline your billing processes, reduce errors, improve accuracy, and provide real-time data and analysis, all of which help increase your productivity and save you time and money. It also helps you make better-informed decisions and focus on the activities that drive revenue for your business.
At Tekton Billing, we’re constantly developing new automation capabilities within ZOEY and finding new ways to help save our partners’ time and money.
If you’re looking for a new telecoms billing platform that helps you be more accurate, efficient and profitable, then don’t hesitate to get in touch!
