Note 62: Maintenance Lifecycle

Posted: 09 March 2009

Each product and service purchased by a customer will undergo a maintenance lifecycle during the lifetime of the biller / customer relationship. Before the customer establishes a billing relationship there will be no billing details stored, after the customer's billing relationship has commenced (many) products and services will be provisioned, and when the relationship ends entries will be end-dated and remain though they will no longer be used by billing.

Maintenance may be initiated using the billing application's own screens, from sub-screens embedded within Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, reflect a biller's change to the customer's status (e.g. disconnection for non-payment), or execute remote requests issued by an external customer's systems. The source of maintenance transactions is less important than their actions, and across the lifetime of their relationship with a biller, a customer is likely to be maintained by different mechanisms.

Regardless of source, pre-validation of maintenance requests is performed to confirm that the requested changes are permitted for the customer, that the product combinations are allowed, and that the network can support the changes (where applicable). This validation may be performed by the applications capturing the details or by the billing / provisioning systems when the maintenance request is received. If errors or problems are detected these will be identified allowing the staff or customer to change the offending details and resubmit. Where pre-validation is performed outside the billing / provisioning systems (e.g. in CRM systems), the same validation rules must be employed to avoid valid maintenance from being rejected, and to avoid the staff / customer frustration of maintenance requests that pass external pre-validation but are then rejected when passed to billing / provisioning.

Maintaining a customer's product and service data is tightly aligned with the provisioning process. New connections, maintenance and terminations / cancellations may be reflected in the network and/or in billing. The complications of provisioning are also reflected in billing's maintenance lifecycle, including the need to keep the details of the network aligned with customers' billings.

The majority of the maintenance lifecycle is concerned with the commencement of recurring charges, rate/discount plans and other long-term customer structures. Non-recurring (one-time) charges may also be provisioned as part of this process (e.g. installation charges). Usage charges will be based around actual network use rather than customer provisioning / maintenance.

Capturing customer details

The establishment of new customers must capture information that is independent of the products and services sold. Examples include the customer's identity (name, identity numbers (where applicable)), where to send their bills (postal address, email details), which media is preferred (paper, internet portal), bill format (detailed, summary, sections), customer segmentation (generated by the biller), their initial credit rating/score (if applicable), payment preferences (direct debit, pre-paid, post-paid), and language preferences (Braille, Large Font, French).

Existing customers may have specific details confirmed (e.g. contact details) when new purchases are made, though credit checks may be performed before high-value items are purchased to reconfirm the customer's ongoing creditworthiness.

The details stored for individuals will be different to those stored for companies. Date-of-birth and details of personal ID numbers (e.g. US social security number (SSN), drivers licence number) may be used to identify an individual during the identification process. Individuals may also act as an authorised representative for another customer. For example, a customer may have their own phone service, and also be an authorised representative for their elderly parent's account.

Companies will have different means of identifying themselves (e.g. Australian Business Number (ABN)) and may have corporate relationships between entities that must also be captured. Details of related entities can be used when assessing a corporation's total purchasing with the biller, or, if their bills remain unpaid, which entities must have their services suspended or terminated.

Add / Install / Provision

Each of the customer's billable products and services must be established in the biller's network and / or added to the billing system. There may be service features installed in the network that are not charged for (e.g. call waiting), and there may be billing-centric constructions (e.g. discount plans) that do not affect the network. Biller-specific business rules determine whether the network and/or billing is updated.

The installation of bundled offerings presents additional challenges since different products and services, using possibly unrelated networks, must be installed concurrently. The biller must determine the billing rules that apply when a bundle is only partially provisioned.

The challenge of correctly provisioning services is often greater for the network than for billing. In these cases, successful network completion can be used as the trigger to forward installation details to billing. The order of processing can also be reversed to use the successful update of the billing system to drive provisioning in the network.

New network connections are likely to be sent to both the network and billing systems. The information included in new service connections can include parameters (determinants) used when determining the charges' correct rates. For example, a customer may be charged a different rate depending on a new communication line's maximum speed.

Billing-centric constructions, such as discount and negotiated rate plans, are sent to the billing system because they affect how the customer is charged for their network access and use, rather than the operation of the network connection itself. In their respective networks, phone calls will still be connected and water will still flow regardless of the prices charged for each.

The division between these two areas can blur when billing functions are performed in the network. Billers offering pre-paid services, such as mobile phones, may require rating (and taxation) be performed prior to network use. Billers may perform these billing functions within their network to achieve the required performance and availability, and avoid the revenue losses that can occur with delayed balance adjustments. In these cases, new customer rate plans can require change within the 'network' to update entries held within the pre-paid billing functions.

Delays in providing details to billing can result in back-dated processing in billing. Whilst the biller's systems may be capable of handling billing maintenance in real-time using the current date, and most transactions may be performed in this manner, delays by external parties, internal system problems or error processing can generate entries with 'historical' dates. If accurate commencement dates are important to the biller, their systems must be able to handle backdated transactions, even if the date to be processed is only yesterday. Some billing systems, built around an assumption of real-time processing, can find it difficult to perform processing for transactions in the 'past'.

Non-recurring (one-time) charges are candidates for such historical processing. Charges may be incurred by business partners without real-time access to the biller's billing platforms. The charges passed are correctly dated when they occur, but may be in the past on their arrival at billing.

Update / Change / Modify

Once established, products, services and customer details will need to be modified to reflect ongoing changes in the customer's needs. For example, customer details such as their mailing address, billing hierarchy or negotiated rates may need adjustment without canceling the underlying network services.

The biller may segment the staff who perform different types of customer maintenance. Changes to the customer's billing address may be performed by a wide range of (authorised) staff, whilst rate and other complex changes may be limited to specialist groups.

The methods and limitations on maintaining customer details will differ by biller, and possibly by billing system where more than one exists within a biller. Whilst most changes may be effective dated to provide an audit trail, the biller may decide that some customer details can reflect only the latest value. For example, the customer's outstanding (debt/credit) balance may be stored without effective dating.

Maintenance performed on some customer data can indirectly modify processing performed elsewhere. For example, if a customer uses 'inheritance' down through a billing hierarchy to specify a rate plan to services within the hierarchy, changing 'where' a service is located in such a hierarchy may change which rate plan it inherits and uses to calculate prices (rating), and without changing any other property of the service itself.

Cancel / Terminate

All that has been provisioned against the customer will one day be canceled or terminated. Each product, service, discount plan, and rate plan will be end-dated reflecting its individual end-of-life, or the end of the customer / biller relationship. This is the case for the long-term, recurring structures rather than usage or non-recurring charges which are one-time and billed as they occur.

When special discount plans and negotiated rate plans are canceled whilst retaining an active network service, the customer may revert to the biller's standard rates. Such a cancellation is billing-centric and may not be reflected to the network. However, the cancellation of a network service will generate changes in billing to end-date the corresponding services entry and end any associated recurring charges. The cancellation of the service in billing may generate a cascade of cancellations 'as-of' the service's end-date for related pricing structures such as discount and rate plans.

Non-recurring charges may be generated by the cancellation process where pricing structures such as bundle and contract offerings contain early termination penalties, or where levies are charged for biller-initiated disconnections. The dates of these additional charges will need to be chosen to ensure they fall within the effective (start and end) dates used to extract charges for the bill cycle.

The accumulated cancellation of products and services can lead to the situation where no active services exist on an account, and / or no active accounts exist for a customer. When a customer's account has no active services remaining (and no source of future charges), the biller may invoke business rules to cancel and finalise the account, generating a final bill. This housekeeping activity reflects the reality of no future activity on the account, enables any outstanding debt or credit to be finalised, and allows the biller to avoid the ongoing costs associated with generating empty, zero value bills.

Tags: Billing, Customer, Service, Product, Add, Change, Delete