Telecom Billing OSS – Telecom Billing System And Its Importance
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.
Billing systems have an important task to play in all kinds of services on offer, regardless of how simple or complex it may be. PSTN phone lines have been around for ages, so billing their usage should be straight forward. This is true as long as we do not include things like long distance and international calls. Different areas have different rates and they need to be billed properly. Similarly, when a customer moves operators and wants to retain their phone number, that throws up a new billing challenge.
The more modern solutions, like cellular services, have even more complexities in offerings. In developed nations, the introduction of 3G services has meant that mobile networks are now being used for both voice and data services. The rates for both are different and so are their usages. In the developing nations, there are multiple short term and long term plans for plain 2G voice services too. The billing systems need to address all these variations.
While the importance of telecom billing solutions is clear, their deployment needs to be looked at in more detail. There are many aspects of a proper billing solution that need to be considered. A standard billing solution will encompass everything from hardware to customer support – the complete cycle.
The most basic requirement for a billing solution is the hardware, a system that can run telecom OSS. The next, obviously, is the software itself. The software has to be good enough to scale to a large number of customers and flexible enough to handle various service offerings. The next item is the billing cycles. Most billing solutions allow for a certain number of billing cycles where the usage is billed in bulk processing. ISPs need to finalize how many cycles per month and when to have them.
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.
All in all, Telecom Billing Software is vital for modern telecom services providers. With the varied customer requirements and market demands of variations in plans, a robust billing system is mandatory to track usage, bill customers and collect payments. As an ISP, the whole Telecom OSS has to be well thought of and just investing in software is not enough.
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