Telecom Convergent Billing - Telecom Billing

What is Convergent Billing?

If you assume that an operator is offering various services like mobile voice, fixed voice, data, IPTV, broadband, pre-paid, and post-paid, etc. Then a customer can subscribe one or more of these services from the same operator. But a customer want to have a single invoice and single view of his account.

A convergent billing is defined as the integration of all service charges onto a single customer invoice and a unified view of the customer. For this a customer need to call a call center to get the detailed account information of all the services provided. Customer receives a single bill then it will be easy to make a single payment for all the services.

A genuine convergent Billing System is able to converge any number and integration of products and services in to a single bill, irrespective of the type of product and market segment, i.e., prepaid and postpaid services.

The other important element in subscribing the convergent billing is a single product and price catalogue for pre-paid as well as post-paid customers.

Benefits of Convergent Billing

The main benefits of convergent billing will definitely help operators in achieving the following major benefits −

• Single product and service catalogue gives better time to market and reduced cost of implementation.
• A unified bill enables cross-service discounts, so that customers who order multiple services can receive preferential pricing.
• Convergent billing supports multi-service packaging and pricing, whereby existing customers are offered to provide new services and new customers are attracted by innovative service bundles.
• Centralized customer care and support for both type of customers ( pre-paid and post-paid).

Major Bottlenecks

Up until this point, it has been a fantasy of all the huge telecom administrators to accomplish genuine union. May be tomorrow some charging framework would come which will bolster genuine meeting of all the item and administrations, but today it has the following obstacles to achieve real convergence −

• Real time Charging Systems like Ericsson IN or Nokia Siemens Charging System are famous systems to offer solution for pre-paid product and services. These systems are not flexible to make any arrangements to handle various functionalities for various post-paid customers for example: complex customer hierarchies, CDR re-rating, volume discounts, flexible reporting, roaming charging, interconnect charging, etc.
• Postpaid billing systems like Convergys Infinys or Amdocs Billing Systems are more useful for post-paid product and services. These systems are not able to handle pre-paid traffic and charge the calls in real time. Most important thing is that these systems cannot be made highly available because of their base architecture.

Keeping the two previously mentioned limitations together, in the event that we combine both the frameworks by doing a sort of interfacing between paid ahead of time and post-paid frameworks, at that point it might be conceivable to accomplish a genuine union. Organizations like Convergys and Ericsson are working a similar way to consolidate the two frameworks and utilize required functionalities from both sort of frameworks and influence them to single Convergent Billing System.