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With the telecommunications sector plagued by aging, inflexible systems, companies need solutions capable of supporting a rapidly growing and changing portfolio of voice and data offerings, servicing a demanding customer base that are have higher expectations.
“Many businesses, such as smaller ISPs, simply do not have the expertise in-house to manage billing and provisioning for voice and DSL activation, or obtain the information they need to keep suppliers such as big Carriers in line. Many of the current ISP billing systems in the marketplace are incapable of managing increasingly complex products that leverage the convergence between voice and data, and most have no provisioning capability at all. Service Providers are forced to use two or more systems to manage provisioning, customer management and billing.”
“Large Service Providers are not immune either. Even Tier 3 Service Providers with tens of millions in turnover are realising that developing and supporting such complex systems requires many talented staff resources, over a long period of time, and a large support infrastructure and team. The Carriers are constantly updating and altering interfaces, the End Users require more and more information, and the regulatory environment is becoming increasingly complex. The cost of outsourcing to a reliable partner provides more flexibility, a quicker time to market for new products and services, and the return on investment (ROI) case stacks up very well with the low upfront outlay”, says Paul Dundas, Emersions CEO.
Emersion’s super-flexible Billing Sub-System allows plans for all types of products and services to be created. The Rates component allows rate cards to be created and managed to associate with plans, including shifting rates based on time, quantity or usage; call block partitions; and traffic zones. Plans can be linked making it really easy to build bundles and apply discounts or concessions without needing to create countless plans that are both confusing and difficult to manage.
As well as all the flexibility provided in the Plan and Rate components, Emersion also stores historical rate information that allows historical invoicing as well as re-rating to be performed. The Billing Engine automatically generates invoices in Adobe® Acrobat® PDF format for customers, whether they are Service Providers, Agents or End Users. A single, unified bill is presented, showing customers’ bundles, plans and charges. Customers may view their bills on-line or receive them via email.
Teamed with the other System Modules for Customer Management, Provisioning, Payment Services, Data Retrieval and verification and the soon to be developed Stock Module the Emersion Platform and Powerful Application Programming Interface, developed on the Emersion ‘Umbrella Architecture’ provide a degree of flexibility not often seen in Services of this kind to date.
The Emersion platform comprises a Web portal user interface that allows customers to access their plans and services and a powerful Application Programming Interface (API) that interfaces with multiple Carriers and Service Providers, internal and customer management systems using different communications protocols, such as web services, FTP, XML and SOAP. CDRs and RADIUS data usage are retrieved from carriers or the Service Provider without user intervention. The Emersion product was developed specifically to satisfy the needs of customers selling complex products such as Telephony, Broadband and 3G mobile phone plans initially for Australia’s wholesale and retail market.
Emersion’s ‘Umbrella Architecture’ eliminates many of the manual processes required to order and provision a service. For example, to fulfil a customer order for a broadband and telephony bundled service, several steps must be managed:
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The customer must be identified (or added if new). |
| 2. |
Products and plans must be selected. |
| 3. |
Service qualification must be completed to confirm the products can be delivered to the end customer’s premises. |
| 4. |
If available, the service is ordered via a legacy or business-to-business interface to the Carrier. |
| 5. |
Once the order is taken, the customer may ask for status updates on provisioning. The service provider must also be notified of pending completion so it can advise the customer and e-mail the shipping department to send out the modem and other necessary hardware. |
| 6. |
Once delivery of the service is completed, customers must be invoiced for the services, which may include hardware costs, monthly recurring fees, calls charges and data usage. |
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Invoice payments must then be automatically deducted from customers’ credit card or Direct Debit facility regularly. |
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