Consolidating distributed data into a single customer view

Summary

By consolidating their customer / account / service relationships, billers can generate whole-of-customer (WOC) views of their customers' data that can be valuable in areas as diverse as customer care, credit management and bundled pricing. Whole-of-customer views are constructed from two elements: customer hierarchies used to link distributed data together ('structure'), and the billing data to be consolidated ('content').

With whole-of-customer views, a biller's staff can accurately address customer inquiries using data accessed from a central 'location' instead of manually processing inquiries across the separate applications supporting each product/network silo. Customers can avoid using separate contact numbers within the same biller, and avoid being transferred between a biller's different call centres to complete their transaction(s).

WOC views can:

Allow debt management at the customer level rather than by network silo,
Reveal a customer's broader value across all their product purchases, not just a silo's minority, and
Support 'sticky' pricing bundles performed across network silos to retain customers and reduce churn.

Constructing whole-of-customer (WOC) views

Building WOC views requires the ongoing consolidation and, importantly, the maintenance of data related to:

The relationships between customers' billing account(s) and related network services (structure)
The specific information that will be consolidated into a WOC view (content)

The infrastructure established for building, processing with and presenting WOC views can be reused against different aspects of customers' billing, network and business data.

WOC views are not established without some cost, both in financial terms and in the system maintenance required to maintain their 'usefulness'. The financial amounts expended must be balanced against the financial (e.g. bad debt) and other benefits (e.g. customer care) that flow from their use.

The maintenance costs flow from the dynamic nature of any operational environment. Once the WOC infrastructure is established, staff (and customers) may expect that as new products and networks become operational they are included in the WOC views. Existing billing systems may be consolidated or replaced over time necessitating changes in how and where billing data is sourced.

Structure: customer relationships

Customer relationships can be built by either 'physically' consolidating all billing data from siloed networks, or by providing 'logically' aggregated views to data that remains in separate billing applications. Physical consolidation is complex to achieve due to the requirement for system and data migrations, but the subsequent WOC processing is easier since structural data is 'local' and maintained as part of regular operations.

Where billing cannot be consolidated in the short-term, or for other reasons must be kept separate, a 'logical' view can substitute for the WOC view instead. This approach requires the extraction of information from distributed systems and its consolidation as required to staff, customers and processing 'as if' it were held in one place. A logical view's processing must address issues of currency (when was the data last updated (e.g. current 'as of' 9 p.m. last night)), performance (e.g. time to aggregate 'on demand'), throughput (can aggregated credit management be performed across all customers), and availability (scheduled downtime for one or more data repositories).

The three data concepts used to build the 'structure' of WOC views are those of 'customer', (billable) account and network service. The hierarchy built with these three concepts may be supplemented by 'billing hierarchy' information abstracted from the source data's billing application(s), but by using a simple, three-level structure a wide range of billing systems can be accommodated easily.

Customer - Where billers have implemented the 'customer' data concept, it forms the top entry in the billing hierarchy and represents the individual or business entity responsible for the billing data aggregated in the hierarchy's lower levels. A consistent and accurate 'customer' identifier is required if information across billing systems is to be accurately linked. For example, the correct accounts for each 'Stephen Jones' customer must be linked into their (separate and) correct WOC views.

Billers without large corporate customers or 'small' networks / geographical coverage may not have needed historical linkages between accounts and services. The aggregation that WOC views provide may not generate sufficient business benefit to offset the costs and complexities involved.

For those billers who have implemented the 'customer' concept, the WOC hierarchy links each 'customer' to one or more (billable) 'accounts' as the top level of a WOC view. Residential / consumer billing is often simple associating each 'customer' with a small number of (billable) 'accounts'. Residential / consumer accounts may include just the family home / primary account, or bill other properties (e.g. holiday homes) / network products (e.g. fixed and mobile phones, gas and electricity) separately.

Commercial customers are more likely to associate a larger number of (billable) accounts per customer representing customers' different business divisions and/or branch offices. Larger customers may have inter-corporate (group) relationships that may support 'whole-of-group' views if the biller maintains the necessary customer-to-customer 'group' relationships. Billers may already capture the necessary data for these customer relationships so that related corporate entities can be identified when bankruptcies and other financial difficulties are encountered.

Accounts - Each account in the WOC hierarchy represents the billing location from which bills are produced and debt (credit) balances are held. Accounts associate customers' network services together so that their related charges can be grouped for periodic billing. Simple accounts may only have one service, whilst customers with multiple accounts may use them to direct how their (network) charges are grouped.

Structurally, services from different networks can be grouped under the one account since little (if any) service-specific and/or network-specific detail needs to be held at the account's WOC level.

Services - Each billable service is structurally stored under the accounts outlined above. Whilst each service can hold its (network-) specific connection details (e.g. network type, effective operation dates, pre- / post-paid, and unique identifier), these details may not be required for all WOC processing. A service's identifier and network type may just act as a unique key against which other billing information (content) is aggregated.

Details about the service can identify where the data is sourced from (e.g. product / network silo), or filter the data presented for processing (e.g. aggregate phone call details across mobile and VoIP services only).

Content: customer data and its business benefits

The business benefits that flow from WOC views are based on the billing information being consolidated. Below are three business functions where aggregated data can drive business benefit. Other data that could be consolidated using WOC views include revenue, network usage (call minutes, tollway journeys), disputes, service calls, and network outages.

Customer Care - Customers who contact billers do not care how the biller's internal systems are arranged. They want to contact the biller with complex, cross-product inquiries, disputes and purchase requests and have them answered by the person who answers the phone. The same happens if they are performing these inquiries through an internet portal.

WOC views allow the data from a biller's distributed systems to be consolidated and presented to the biller's staff and customers in homogenised views. In the background there may be complex processing required to aggregate data sources and disaggregate purchase requests, but to the staff and customers using the WOC view, the information appears to present a seamless, single view of the customer.

A customer care view could aggregate a customer's historical purchases, connected network services, unbilled transaction details (e.g. all calls from fixed, mobile and VoIP 'networks'), prepaid balances, and outstanding debt. Customer purchases of bundled pricing plans can be qualified against the customer's entire profile and not just the products / purchases billed from any one silo.

A customer's status, market segmentation and assessed (lifetime) value can be used uniformly across the biller's business. High-value customers can receive the same (high) level of care whenever they contact the biller, and high-risk customers can be assessed in a uniform manner across each network and product suite when they attempt a purchase.

Bundled Pricing - The biller's staff (or automated processing) can use WOC views to use the complete customer information to offer customers more complex bundled packages that bind more of a customer's business to the biller. The discounts / value offered to the customer by the bundle may reduce the customer's likelihood of churning from the biller to a competitor. The offers displayed to staff (and customers) may be pre-filtered by specialised processing that only presents those offers the customer is qualified to receive (based on their services and / or overall profile).

If the biller's billing applications are siloed, any bundled purchases may require a disaggregation process to separately enable the appropriate piece(s) in each billing application. In these circumstances, bundled pricing may also require the biller develop a centralised (bundle) rating engine that bring the necessary data together for accurate pricing before redistributing it for separate billing.

Credit Management - Billers have improved their credit management by moving from billing each network service on a separate bill to aggregating all network services on one bill. Billers with more contemporary billing systems may also be capable of billing services from different networks on the same bill. WOC views allow the debt from customer's separate accounts held on siloed billing systems to be addressed in a consolidated manner. This extends the account-based consolidation of debt allowing:

Fewer systems (one ?) monitoring debt providing more consistent processing
Both 'risky' and 'excellent' customer behaviours from one product segment can be shared, rather than remain isolated in one billing silo - High-value customers may have disconnections deferred, risky customers may have additional purchases declined
Historical behaviour can be captured for better credit risk assessments - New connections from existing (and old) customers can receive more accurate risk assessments allowing better terms to be offered to high-value customers, and deposits to be captured from risky customers (both existing and historic).
Complete suspension / disconnection of delinquent customers - Historically, disconnections were limited to those services known within the local billing application. Credit management performed using WOC views can drive suspension / disconnection across a customer's entire relationship (though phone companies may choose to leave one (limited) phone service connected to facilitate ongoing customer contact).

Since debt/credit is often held against the account, credit management (WOC) views may not use the service information available within the WOC hierarchy.

Tags: Billing, Hierarchy, Data, Customer View, Credit Management