Telecom Billing Software - Why Telecom Billing OSS Is Important

Jun.11, 2010 in Computers

The telecom domain is a very exciting area now a days. We now have everything from a simple phone line to mobile cellular phones. Today with so many offerings and bundling options, customers have the freedom to choose what they want and how they use the services. As an ISP it is important that regardless of the customer usage, every byte that travels through the network is accounted for. This is the importance of Telecom billing solution.

In voice services, things look very straight forward and we have standardized rates almost everywhere with unlimited local calling. But a simple service like phone can have other complexities like long distance charges and local number portability wherein you switch operators and want to retain the number, among other things. These may not look daunting, but they are vital for the ISP to remain profitable. Robust billing systems can track these and bill accordingly.

At the other end of spectrum are the mobile phone services. Mobile services with 3G have expanded to mobile data services too. Now you have plans where customers are billed per kilobyte of mobile bandwidth being used. Given how frequently customers may switch between voice and data services, the billing system need to capture this properly and bill the customers correctly.

It is clear that billing systems are great for telecom operators and they cover everything from traditional phone lines to the latest data plans on 3G mobile networks. But there are some costs and implementation considerations that one needs to be cognizant of while installing these systems. Everything from hardware to customer care services need to be looked at.

Getting good hardware fast enough and reliable enough to run good software is a great starting point. The next is the telecom OSS that will be tracking all the usages and billing accordingly. The third aspect is the billing cycle. While ideally it would great to have individual customer billing cycles, it may not be a practical solution. Most billing solutions adopt the batch processing approach; you determining the billing cycles is important.

The next is the bill distribution feature. For many customers, a paper bill is the preferred method of getting billing information. So you need to print and post the bills and that requires a good automated system to do these things, along with a reliable distribution network. After distributing the bills, you need an equally good system to collect the payments.

Finally, is the customer support on the billing queries. It is not surprising that most customers get queries on the billing details as they feel over charged. A good support base is required, one that can handle all these queries and settle the issues amicably with the customers.

In conclusion, Telecom Billing OSS is critical to the success of ISPs. There are many aspects of billing solution deployment that require some planning and investments. If executed properly, Telecom Billing System can give great rewards.