The Customer Care & Billing platform provides a carrier grade, scalable, robust and flexible platform. The solution is designed to answer all the needs a service provider may have. It includes modules that enable the user to manage the service provider’s offerings and their pricing schemas, the customers and their specific packages, billing and invoicing.
The solution provided is a fully featured Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) software platform, designed to address the challenges of delivering various services through multiple business models.
The Solution has strong audit control over all of the processes that process usage from the CDR level up to the summary level of the Invoice. It provides for accurate usage traceability and accountability to each of the customers.
The following describe the porduct modules:
Mediation and Event Collection
Advanced and robust module that manage the various types of interaction with the different network element (NE’s) in order to collect the relevant events information (e.g. CDR, EDR, IPDR etc). The module enable easy and rapid introduction of new NE’s and events formats, the most common configuration activities are performed using a GUI tool.
The Mediation Layer role is to accept and processes any format of xDR, it provides a user-friendly GUI for the xDR format definitions, validation and filtering rules. The mediation supports xDRs from the network elements in push and pull modes. The mediation interfaces to a variety of network elements, allowing retrieving data from its source (switch, IN platform, SMS center, MMS center, Data, WAP gateway or third-party mediation system, etc.), normalizing it and preparing the data for billing. The mediation provides validation, data parsing and filtering, and aggregation of incoming records.
The Event Collection layer role is to use the mediation data to prepare the records that need to be rated. Collection can be done periodically, on demand or in real-time. Part of the data collection process is the validation and verification of the data for completeness and errors as well as verifying that the relevant customer service or partner agreement exists. Then the Billable Events are generated and match to their corresponding customer services.
Collection can be conducted regularly, automatically triggered according to a predefined schedule (nightly, hourly etc) and can also be performed on an on going basis, or in real time.
The Total-e also offers several audit and control mechanisms to allow for the correct processing of usage and performance records, recovery and reporting capabilities.
Product Management
This module enable easy definition of new services, price plans, partner agreement and other financial business policy aspects, e.g. discounts commitment etc, both for the retail and partners arena using an intuitive and advance user interface.
The product management allows users to define rating schemes through a unique decision tree structure. Each basic rating method, representing a ‘branch’ of the tree, can be combined with other basic methods to form any number of rating schemes, incorporating many types of decisions into one price plan. Furthermore, new rating parameters can be added at any time, giving the organization the flexibility needed to introduce new rating schemes quickly and efficiently. Rating schemes includes one time charges, recurring charges and usage charges.
As well, interconnect services, products and agreements are defined in the Product management, the module is generic and rule driven. It holds the rules and regulations of a partner agreement without naming a specific partner. Sets of partner agreements can be defined and then used for multiple partners.
Product Management defines entities to manage marketing campaigns and promotions, this include Price Plan Promotion that overrides the pricing schema for a defined period (for better rate), Market level Price Plan that define default rates for all customers, packages and bundles of different services and rating schemes into one package, Service Commitment mechanism ,cross services discount (discount that take into consideration different services ,e.g. based on the voice consumption calculate discount for the SMS usage) and volume discount. Interconnect partners can have a separate rate plan that is used to cost its calls.
Rating Engine
The advanced rating engine supports the flexible definitions of the different rating method defined in the product catalog. The rating engine supports both online and offline rating methods (i.e. postpaid and prepaid models).
Every event type that is collected by the mediation and collection can be rated by the rating engine, e.g. Voice, MSC, SMSC, VMS, MMS, IN etc. In case of errors, unbilled, rated events can be re-rated using dedicated tools in bulks or as single events.
The rating engine supports any rating complexity according the service type, such as step rating, tiered rating, calendar based rating (peak, off-peak, week-end, holidays etc), duration based, event size based, distance based rates (local, regional, national, international etc). The rating engine is able to set special rates (volume discounts, calls to special numbers, calls routed through certain operators, calls to mobile numbers, free-phone etc).
The rating engine supports the requirement of the evolving prepaid business. The rating engine Provide Real-time, Radius AAA authentication, provide real-time Balance and real-time computation of remaining balance, Real-Time event processing, Real-Time Disconnect and Real-Time credit enforcement.
Customer Care
A client based application to manage the customers and partners life cycle. Enabling the operators and service providers users to have a centralized 360° view of the customers and partners accounts.
The customer service representative (CSR) interface provide a complete view of the customer / partner record – including most updated customer activities, account balance, payment and other financial transactions (e.g. adjustments, credit, debits etc) and customer history. This client based application can be used by CSR’s, agents and dealers.
The Customer Care support customer hierarchies. Enable the organization to identify special relations between customers. These relationships can be used to support special functionality such as charging, hierarchical discounts, hierarchy bills and more. The relationships are maintained in a tree directory structure. Each node in the tree can have one parent only (except from the root which does not have a parent), and an unlimited number of children. The extent of the hierarchy (number of levels) is unlimited by the system.
Trouble tickets can be opened by CSR upon customer complaint. A complete history of the trouble tickets can be accessible at all times.
Charge plans allow the CSR to assign payment responsibility for each charge type to a selected customer. For example, a charge plan for a specific service can be defined so that a certain customer pays for maintenance, another customer pays for usage, and a third customer pays the monthly fee.
Web-enabled Self-Service
Total-e Web-enabled Self-Service module enables the service provider to provide customer care services to their customers through the Internet on a 24-hour-a-day basis. This module provides the customers with secure access to their own personal information using their standard Internet browser. The Web Self Care application includes Viewing Customer information (i.e. Call Detail, Current Account Balance, Last Bill Information, Next Bill information, Bills History, Payments History and Update Customer information (i.e. Change Password, update Contact information, update Billing Address.
Financial Management
The Total-e Accounts Receivable (A/R) module is responsible for the financial aspects of a customer accounts. This includes billing results (commercial invoices), credited and debited items, payment collection, cash application, balance management treatment and reporting to the General Ledger (GL). Total-e provides an accurate, comprehensive and clear picture of an account’s open balances. Functioning as a sub-ledger, Billing Solution reports every financial transaction that occurs within the system to the GL. The module supports the definition of various treatment plans and their application to bad debt accounts according to predefined parameters as well as Credit Limit Monitoring that continuously check unbilled amount of the calls made by the customers and act accordingly (e.g. can bar the service), late payment surcharge calculation in case payment terms has exceeded and more.
Invoicing
Compiles, generates, and summarizes all the elements that are to appear on the consolidated bill. These include recurring charges, usage charges, one-time charges, credits and adjustments from one or more lines of business. Billing also performs product-specific tax calculations. The system allows service providers to produce a single bill for customers subscribing to different services or partner statement / declaration. Based on the customer hierarchies, multiple bills are consolidated and a discount engine calculates the consolidated discount. The Billing processes are conducted on a cyclic basis thus enabling distribution of customers / partners predefined cycle programs to balance the workload. The billing system has the ability to run periodic billing (e.g. monthly, quarterly, annually, etc) and billing by demand. The system provides the ability to create and change bill layout templates using an enhanced printing mechanism. The printing mechanism uses tokens as a way of creating dynamic printing layouts embedded with information items acquired from the billing system.
Provision
The provisioning mechanism provide a real time interface with the network elements (e.g. Switch) or other external provisioning modules, in order to provision the customer’s services and features to the network. Upon customer registration, or any modification of service feature, the detailed parameters are updated and delivered to the relevant network element.
The Provisioning module is capable of sending all service related provisioning commands from the customer care module (and other backend process) to a multi-vendor Network Elements. Activities includes: creation / deletion / disconnection / reconnection of subscribers, addition / deletion /change in all type of value added and supplementary services (e.g. voice mail, call forward, call waiting etc), change of equipment (MIN, IMSI, ESN etc) and more.
Resource Management
The Resource Management module enables service providers to set up and manage the different resources that are required for the different telecommunication services they provide. These include Scratch cards for prepaid services, SIM cards, and Phone numbers or any other resource / accessories.
Resource Management manages the life cycle of the resource as well as the activities which are required: resource loading (from file), generation of resource id’s, assignment to distributors, hold, un-hold, etc.
The Resource Management module supports pool management. Resources can be assigned to different pools (e.g. in-used, golden) from which they will be assigned to the different services according to specific characterizations.
The Customer Care uses the Resource Management module to support Automatic and Manual assignment of resources. As part of the process of adding customer services (e.g. telephony service), available telephone number / resource from the relevant pool will be automatically assigned. Assignment can also be done manually, allowing the user to select a specific number / resource or a golden number from a dedicated pool.
Security Administration
The security module controls users and their privileges, and protects information stored in the system’s repository from being accessed or manipulated by unauthorized individuals. All users defined in the system are assigned to groups, with each group reflecting specific user profiles such as sales representatives, senior sales representatives and accounting department personnel. System administrators manage both users and user-groups and are authorized to create new users, change the privileges of a certain group and move users to different user groups.
Reports
The reports module provides set of reports that present different aspects of the activities performed in the system, the reports include Business reports, Billing reports, Interconnect reports, Partner reports, Finance reports, Usage Collection reports, Fault Management, Security reports and others. The reports extract and consolidate specific data from the system, and present it in an organized layout that can be viewed on screen, searched and/or printed. The system Reports are created and managed using Crystal Report Generator tool.
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