Note 8: Bill Distribution, Reporting and Customer Maintenance

Posted: 08 November 2005

Bill Presentation / Distribution

Bill presentation deals with the bill's physical appearance. The charges, supporting information and any marketing messages, as determined in the preceding function, must be formed into an effective format for presentation to the customer. Distribution involves getting the bill to other parties, principally, but not only, the customer. Thus, distribution is concerned with both media and mechanisms.

A bill's physical appearance is influenced by the biller's marketing function. Beyond the need to present a request for payment, in a format that explains why the customer is charged the billed amounts, a bill can differentiate the biller from its competitors. Since the bill is a core communication channel to the customer, the clarity and breadth of the information must be carefully considered, and may include information unrelated to what has been billed. For example, energy companies may want to show customers the quantity of carbon released to the atmosphere. Other information may be required by regulation or tax law (i.e. due to the bill's status as a financial document).

The bill's details may be distributed through many different channels. Many of these channels are directed at the customer, but at least one of them will be for the biller's internal staff. External channels include paper, email, internet based self-service portals, and optical media (e.g. DVDs). The channels used for different customer segments will depend on cost and useability trade-offs. Paper is relatively expensive compared to delivery via the internet, and does not support the data analysis desired by corporate customers. On the other hand, the useability of paper and internet-delivered consumer bills for mass-market customers is high, but corporate bills composed of thousands of pages and delivered by courier truck are more of a challenge.

The same bill information may be delivered to multiple destinations. For example a summarised format may be delivered to a corporate customer's head office on paper, while a detailed statement may be delivered by DVD to the customer's data analysis department, and location specific reports may be manually downloaded from an internet portal by the customer's regional offices. In this case the same information is utilised, but the views are tailored for different needs within the customer's business functions.

A bill not only requests payment from a customer, but also provides support for the revenue the biller receives. Bills invariably need to be retained for a variety of legal, tax and regulatory reasons, and therefore effective storage and retrieval mechanisms are required to address these concerns.

Downstream Reporting / Business Support

Billing generates a high-volume of information that can be used, or is required, by a biller's other business applications. The needs of some of these recipients will be more urgent than others. For example, the identification of possible fraud will require prompt delivery (and indeed may require specific information directly from the network), whilst a profitability analysis of the biller's business can perhaps be addressed with a short delay.

Large corporate customer, industry regulators, and other outside parties may also receive billing reports. In these circumstance, strict segmentation of the report information is required to avoid exposure of private customer details and competitive intelligence.

Some downstream functions, such as financial postings, will require most of the billing detail. Each bill must be traceable to a summarised financial posting, and each summarised financial posting must be related to its constituent sources. Other reporting will be performed on an exception basis. That is, criteria will be applied to identify a small subset of transactions, customers or situations that need individual review.

The information provided by billing to other functions may be raw data that is subjected to further processing. For example, the prices charged to customers for the music they download can be supplied to a biller's content settlement system. The specific settlement arrangements between the biller and each music provider can then be combined with the 'billed' details to determine the individual financial settlements to be paid.

Account Maintenance / Inquiries

When databases are maintained and stored in multiple locations (copies), one of those locations must be nominated as being the point-of-truth (i.e. the database of record). When two locations disagree on a database entry, the value held by the database of record is deemed to be correct. This role as the data 'master' means that the maintenance, replication and back-up processes for the database of record must have integrity.

A billing system contains many databases of record. These hold details of the customer and their billing arrangements captured during the ordering and provisioning processes, and bill and financial transactions generated by billing. Some reference information (e.g. rates) may also be mastered from the billing system.

Some billers may choose to 'master' their customers' details in other functional areas (e.g. a CRM platform). In these cases, the data is supplied to the billing systems by either replication between databases as it is maintained, or only as and when required for the billing process.

Whichever database of record approach a biller takes, the data within the billing systems must be accessible to address internal staff and customer inquiries. Some data maintenance will also be required to update customer details and reflect changes performed by staff (e.g. notes against a customer's account). Historically, batch orders were processed daily. This approach is still performed, but increasingly the direction taken is to perform maintenance in real-time, or near real-time (i.e. with a delay of minutes). This allows any errors to be addressed immediately with the customer rather than the next day.

Customers ringing the biller with an inquiry will be assisted by the biller's staff using an online system that retrieves and updates information held on the billing databases. The online system may be a billing-only interface, or a specialised CRM package that aggregates non-billing details in order to provide richer information about the customer. Where provided, customers can use a self-service portal using internet technologies to examine their own account details, possibly performing limited updates (e.g. purchases) without the intervention of the biller's staff. The biller's staff may use a version of the same internet portal with additional maintenance and inquiry functionality enabled. This additional functionality would perform internal functions not suitable or desirable for customers to operate (e.g. dispute resolution, credit checking).

By volume, most maintenance of the customer database will be sourced from the ordering systems (e.g. CRM application). However, there will be some complex maintenance that is best done manually to allow immediate validation of the correctness of actions performed. For example, if a corporate customer wishes to modify their large organisational hierarchy, manipulation using a GUI screen with its immediate feedback is likely to generate a more accurate result than a batch maintenance order submitted overnight.

Tags: Billing, Reporting, Customer, Maintenance