Discover the Perfect Billing System Example for Marketing

Billing system example for Marketing

[Music] let's move on and talk about billing 2.0 what is it how do you get the most out of your billing systems how do you make them work in concert with your marketing goals bills are important touch points Alice Harris is here from Dish Networks to tell us a little bit about how billing 2.0 is going to make us all zillionaires right exactly yes that's what I'm here all right thank you okay so hello everyone um for those of you that have been here for the last three years I've been here for the last three years and I've actually introduced myself with a different company name every year for the last three years first I'm not going to tell you what those are I am going to tell you though that I retired from my last company in August I'm now working at dish I've worked at dish for two weeks so I can't really speak about my old company's information because that would not be appropriate I don't really I'm not in Billing at dish so I don't really know a whole lot about dish so when you think about okay well then what do I do I did a little bit of Industry research what which we'll get to in a minute but really what I did to ask for your Indulgence this time is I brought prizes so here's the first prize and I'm going to award this myself um if someone can name one of the other two compan companies besides dish that I worked at before you get this lovely bicycle bag so and I I will give you a hint the name of one of them is in the program which is why you get this lovely bicycle bag because it's not just who notices something the fastest it's who actually does the research in the program so let's not be shy yes very good sentury link I actually was very very good let's give him a hand very good I actually was the director of billing services at Quest and worked at Quest and its predecessors and Quest was AC acquired of course by Sentry Link I worked there for 32 years and um just to give you a little bit of background about myself I was the director of Billing Services um the reason why I'm up here speaking to you about marketing on the bill is at Quest we were one of the first North American telecom companies that actively pursued personalized marketing on the customers bill so what we did was um under my watch my wonderful team and it really was my team and not me you know every once in a while I'd get kind of a good idea but it was really mostly my team would um we simplified our bill to make it easier for our consumer and this is the consumer space to make it easier for our consumer customers to understand it then using our vast stores of data um we were able to use that information to provide personalized marketing on the bill we had an eight figure revenue uptick from offers on the bill and it was you know we've talked a lot about data today it was absolutely verifiable that they came from offers on the bill because we tracked each offer to a separate 800 number toll-free number and um we were able to actually tie it to the money that we made so we were very successful in this space um centry link is continuing to go on with that U when I before I left and the last time I was familiar with those numbers that was holding of course there are a lot of things that you need to do to make those hold but let's get back to the contest because I'm very excited about the second half of my prizes um for those of you that don't know a whole lot about Dish Network dish is actually the second largest direct broadcast satellite provider in the US um $ 14 billion dollar in Revenue as of December 31st 2011 14 million customers actually a little bit more than 14 million customers as of June of this year it's the parent company of Blockbuster LLC which is a video a video um kind of a Netflix type thing I suppose I shouldn't say Netflix when I say Blockbuster but I'm learning that business um we have the largest HD lineup of any provider 200 plus channels um award-winning HD and DVR technology for those of you that are from the states you're probably familiar with the hopper which is the little kangaroo that we use for our our television play trade on the NASDAQ exchange recently launched an international ipv service so um I know that dish is probably not really well known here so I've brought a couple of other little prizes um that have to do with Dish and my dear friend and able bed assistant over here Kathy Romano is I'm going to be the prize Award winner for that and this is a very easy contest but I need Kathy's assistants to do it and so there's you get really two things you get the dish prize and you get an introduction to Kathy Romano and who doesn't want that she's an amazing person worked in Billing and revenue insurance for a very long time so I'm going to use two B buzzwords today I'm G to tell you what they are I'm going to use big data and I'm going to use cloud the first time I use Big Data the first person to recognize that I did that raises their hand gets to go over introduce themselves to Kathy pick up a dish prize first time I use cloud same thing intro introduce yourself to Kathy pick up a prize so let's get going I'm just trying to interject a little bit of humor in this afternoon's session so hopefully it's working so let's talk a little bit about the history billing one. billing has been in the Telecom space heavily dependent on the network the network created the records They had to be transported throughout Network well fulfillment actually created the records I'm talking mostly about usage records when they say the network creates the records and it's what we were calling um UDR Universal data detailed records um they have to transport themselves all the way through the network without any pickups or any kind of you know bad data coming through and they need to be transported all the way through through the customers disconnection and they need to arrive there in a way that billing can understand and can build them well the problem with that is a lot of things happen from Network into the bill and bad things can happen it also is a massive collection and Reporting effort it's the original definition of Big Data Matthew claim your prize you can wait till the break if you'd like um there were Revenue exur Assurance activities that are critical to ensuring that we're capturing maximum Revenue invoice presentation primarily focused on Tim L and accuracy and and the thing that always I was hamstrung with in the Telcom billing space was you you focused on accuracy timeliness completeness you wanted to make sure you got everything on the bill but the bad part about that was and we had we had examples of it if the customer for some reason had an ordering problem and it happens with with all customers and they um did five different orders in one month not that unusual really especially today with very mobile society and they had four different usage creating products all of that had to be reflected on the bill and it created a lot of complexity and then when you put the the regulatory requirement to show call detail in the states big regulatory requirement for many many years it made the bill really ugly it made it complex hard to understand customers didn't like it um so so invoice presentation was really just make sure it's all gets on the bill so historically all of those imperatives have really led us to today's challenge old billing systems that are complex and expensive to maintain because they were built to do all those things that you used to have to do and you still have to do in some instances and there was and that just really creates difficulty in meeting Market demands so there have been some improvements so I would say the current state of billing one. is we've had seen some simplification of the invoice and you know through the use of things like color big buttons summarization no detail actually companies have kind of gotten smart now and said regulatory requirements have eased and you don't have to put detail on the bill so they've said hey if you want your detail I'd be more than happy to give it to you but you have to go out and get it electronically or I'm going to charge you to Cent your paper so companies are getting a little bit smarter so really I think we've seen a lot of simplif ification we to me one of the biggest styes in in simplifying further are regulatory requirements around the bill marketing really then has become the value added communication on a standard Service as I've I think I've said this probably every year and I'll say it again marketing is really the month marketing on the bill is your monthly appointment with your customer so you you may have a customer that gets their service on day one never has a problem doesn't churn they leave three years later because they move out of your territory the only time that you get to communicate with that customer is on the monthly invoice whether whether it's an electronic invoice whether you're pushing something to a smart device or whether you're sending him an oldfashioned paper with the stamp on it that's your monthly appointment with your customer you can offer complimentary services using data and one of the things that we did at Quest on our personalized offering um on the bill was we were we did give customers we would look at just a simple example if a customer ordered a lot of games from us or they were Direct TV customer um we would look at their data the data that we controlled of the products that we offered to the customer and we would see that maybe they weren't on our highest speed data service and what we would do is then push an ad on the data services page of their bill that said you know we have a higher speed in your area give us a call got a lot of sales that way really just simple stuff and the great thing that you get from it when you move up to that 2.0 world is your customer then feels a that you're smart and that you're using the data in the way that you use the data and I don't remember who it was that used the phrase last year of digital natives but kids these days and actually kids going up into about age 30 haven't known a time when they haven't had computers and so they are looking at companies that say I know you should know this about me but you're not saying that so you know how dumb are you and here you are trying to present yourself as a technical company that provides enhanced digital and data services but you can't get your own data together to say that about your customer well when you do that billing to0 personalized service on the bill you really are telling your customer hey I know about you and that is very much appreciated you can also use your new technology to enhance billing and payments one of the things that I see happening quite a bit in this space is putting apps out on customers smart devices that allow them to pay their bills without getting a whole lot of information and KY I'm sure can speak to that as well um that allowed them to look at the total amount on the bill because the one thing that I found as we move from 1.0 to 2.0 we don't have to provide regulatorily speaking we don't have to provide all the detail on the bill customers really want to know if I pay $100 a month I want to know that it's not $150 this month I'll take 110 I'm happy with 95 but just tell me it's not 150 so really you present one number to them most of the time they're going to be happy with it and if you push that to a smart device then they're going to think you're smart too so those are the recent improvements that we've seen from billing 1.0 so now because I'm a little bit hamstrung in what I can talk about I went out and I did um a look at recent industry analysis so I went out to the web you know the font of all knowledge and um just looked at a few companies and Transformations and that sort of thing and I just wanted to share this information with you briefly because it's something that you might want to take a look at yourself if you're thinking about embarking on a transformational project um one of the things that we did when we put personalized marketing on the quest bill I did all of that um data research myself and with the exception of one or two conferences that I went to that gave me some great transformational um information and and user cases on we made these Transformations all of the data that I used to sell the business case to our executive leadership I got for free off of the internet so I just kind of Applied that to what I was going to talk about today and have done that for you um I don't have slides just because I thought I'd give you a break and plus I was doing price Patrol and I thought that would be more fun um but this will be in the deck I believe that comes out to people and you'll be able to see the sites that I have for this so the first thing that I was able to find on the the internet was a a 2012 Accenture study so Accenture went out and interviewed 50 Executives from the largest Communication service providers 80% of the companies that they talked to had revenues exceeding $1 billion so we're talking pretty big companies when they talked to the CIO the CEO the SE level people um key billing the following key billing issues were cited Bill accuracy was a problem and the the SE Suite said hey new products and services and devices make accurate rebuilding a real Challenge and I think everyone in this room would agree to that implementation time frames are too long so stop me if this is like new news to anyone um lack of real-time billing now realtime billing there are some some definite uses for real real-time billing I do sometimes think it's a little overrated and and I have a tendency to say near real time um of course our company was also not heavily into the wireless space and we relied on our friends at Verizon to handle that so that could just be my my naive T in that area and the degree of effort required to integrate billing with other applications these sea level folks in the accent study saw as immense and it is quite immense I would agree with that completely and so you know bottom line on this this analysis what Accenture recommended was convergence consolidation of billing applications and then there in that study they cited some customer work that they had done of course that that had solved everyone's problems so um I would I would agree we had 11 billing applications at Quest and that was down from a high of 22 at one point and when you have that many you stop all development if you want to do a huge transformational project and so that becomes very very expensive um convergence can kind of help you do away with that because if you think about your convergence engine and you have apis between all of your billing applications then really what it then becomes is how much do you want to spend and how quickly do you want to do it and you can unbundle it as you go from there and so that's that's the approach that Accenture recommends my next piece of data was from a teleone Blog telom blog Innovation Observatory the title on the study was opportunities in Telco Cloud billing I think this one right there you go very good ding ding ding um the premise is um Telco providers will be trusted providers of cloud Technologies or will act as cloud service Brokers because telcoms really are the experts in the network space been providing it for you know well over 100 years and so when you get into that new technology it's really like you're running a little telom so you want to know that the person that is enabling that cloud service for you is somebody that you can trust the key billing issue that's maintained by this analysis was although Telos will be positioned to provide the service not everyone will be able to Bill without investment to enable pass through billing and I would maintain that this is the place pass through billing where the regional battle operating companies BT um other companies probably have an edge and I will say and I can only speak from the rbox Bas because that's my experience is the reason that we would have an edge in that space is because we've been doing it since the breakup of the Bell System system was built I don't know Kathy about you but I know that we still used pieces of that system to do our pass through billing um between the various companies so it was always a regulatory requirement for us to be able to do it and so we did it fairly well and because it was a bell system asset that was built prior to divesture it's was pretty well controlled not perfect but pretty well controlled so what this analysis The Innovation Observatory recommends is outsourcing this is a for purchase analysis just to let you know it's pretty pricey if you are looking at something in this space so Matthew this is might be something that you're interested in they do provide 12 supplier profiles and as I looked down the profiles that they did of the 12 suppliers in the BSS space it was really all the name players and then a few that are are are maybe a little bit new a little bit smaller volume but have some some pretty compelling strategic advantages so that's another one and then the last industry analysis that I looked at that was on the telive blog which is actually a pretty interesting blog I don't know if anyone's everever everever looked at it but um this one was called redesigning Telco assets billing written by a person named Martin ectors and that was just from April of this year so pretty new research Martin's premises Telcom billing and services are too tightly coupled with the network which is I think we talked a little bit about today um it really creates unnecessary complexity due to that tight integration because like I said when I started out something I think that Kathy talked a little bit about something that burn talked about in his talk was that record has to Traverse all the way through and you hope nothing bad happens to it on the way um billing is also integrated at extremely low levels in the network so what they recommend in the tel retive blog is moving billing outside of the network and it and that will enable new Services now of course they don't go into the details of and exactly how do you do that um that's you know a topic for another day I suppose or a topic at one of these tables out here um but they recommend moving billing outside of the network enabling new Services I thought some of the services that they talked about in this analysis were pretty interesting um creating different billable events when you were inside the call so if you were inside a call with someone and they wanted to push data to you um enable a billable event so that you just hit a yes and they charged you for it and sent you a different record now that's kind of a rocky World thought if you're somebody that's been been doing billing like I have for a long time and you think about but I only I mean I get multiple records per call but I throw all of them away except for one because I only need to use one but now I need to know this one and I need to know this one because I need to do this overall call but then there's this other data charge so how do I do that so very interesting though and if you did decouple the network you could potentially create something like that call billable dire Direction change so I may start out calling Susan paying for that call to Susan but then Susan and I have agre an agreement somewhere within that event where she says oh I'll pay for it now and so you create a different billable record that that piece goes to Susan and this piece goes to me a little bit different than call sharing Revenue sharing um micro payments and subscriptions I won't really talk about that because I think that's something that people have talked about for a very long long time and then ad hoc Revenue sharing so ad hoc Revenue sharing that today I'm it might be this tomorrow it might be that or I might give you on a call from 0 to 20 minutes a DAT or a data event from 0 to 20 minutes I might give you 10% of the first five minutes worth of Revenue and more of a tiered structure so so that was actually a really interesting article they well actually they were all interesting so to bottom line it and to try to catch us up just a little bit our billing 2.0 common options convergent billing so so really billing I wish I could tell you in Billing 2.0 here's the new thing that you need to do but I really don't have that because it's basically the same things that people have been talking about for a long time um convergent billing so enable new applications that can handle new but bundles products and pricing drop the expense of massive migration by using one convergence to pull many charges into one invoice I will ask the question though and so if somebody wants to make a comment um I do have more questions probably for you and maybe we can get like a little five minute dialogue going is one invoice a requirement for customers these days especially if the bill is available electronically do customers even care and I don't think that I would have ever said that you can't have one invoice until I started hearing from my customers who were the people that actually talk to our external customers and they're like ah they're so used to getting it they get it electronically we allow them to do data analysis now and this is more in the Enterprise space one invoice doesn't really matter at all anymore the thing that I think that convergence buys you is you can push customers to the correct system for your cost structure based on their products but because you have a convergence overlay they don't ever know about that so you can optimize your operating expense and your Capital expense within that within that convergent engine the second option Cloud billing and I think we've seen some really good presentations on cloud billing today as burn said though you really need a different setup given different levels of complexity in your customer base so it's maybe not one Cloud it may be one cloud provider providing different billing structures within the cloud and then the last one was Outsourcing and we've seen some Outsourcing examples today as well and those are the two questions that I've actually had for the last two three years does a company really need to do its own billing today and if you don't think about things like customer information security and all the security and controls questions do you need to be the billing expert or is it better to rely on a specialist so more questions than answers but that's kind of what I have questions comments questions for Alice just wait you get a bicycle bag you don't get to ask questions you can ask questions thank you very much indeed for great presentation um so convergence convergence billing could you just expand a little bit beyond that was it convergent invoicing or convergent billing per se you're looking at in terms of cost takeout because there's different ways of cutting the dice in this stuff that's actually a really good point and and the piece that I think most people look at it's a little bit more than electronic stapling which is where we were a number of years ago um it's not complete convergence on invoicing so it's not like you're sending all of the records to one convergent engine and doing anything you want with them you would probably do some suevel of rating within each of the Native billers depending on the products that you're talking about and then do discounting in the convergent engine or do volume thresholding in the convergent engine anything that you have to do at build a you may want to do at the convergent engine although kind of My Philosophy is build all your new if you are going to do the convergence solution build all your new project products in the convergent solution bring your old stuff up depending on how many customers you have and what the growth trajectory is on your old products you may want to bring them into the convergent engine also but your flat rated residential service flat rated Business Service who cares if it ever moves because those customers or you know that those services will go away over time anyway good point next question I question sorry not a question more a statement um at do we've had convergent billing from day one so we we've always had one billing platform and we build all of our services out of one billing platform we also build consumer and Enterprise out of exactly the same billing platform but they are totally different hierarchies totally different structures totally different offers so can be done do our customers care actually I would probably even recommend commend don't go in convergent because it confuses the hell out of our customers we've come up with all sorts of creative offers where marketing just get creative they want to have all sorts of free units and bundles cross product bundles and customers get confused and what they do they call in they complain they think they have billing accuracy issues which are actually perceptions of billing accuracy issues so if you can keep bit simple it's it's kind of nice from a servicing perspective ease of understanding the bill perspective on the flip side it doesn't create the stickiness which is what convergent billing kicked off in the early days it was all about how do I make my customer sticky so he doesn't go away but I'm not sure that it does I'm not sure that it does but uh just interesting learnings and observations that we've had being in a convergence state from day one good point very good we have one more over here and then we'll have to wrap up so back in my days when I used to be with converges we're talking eight nine years ago convergence was the big cell at that point in time and yes to some extent it never made any sense to me because although you may be consolidating from a plat platform point of view at the front end you get one single dispute on on a bill if you haven't got the ability to do conditional kind of payment allocation you're holding up your your your cash flow process throughout the whole the whole cycle it didn't technically make any sense to me at the time looking at it now it seems to service more the internal operator than the actual customer I don't care whether I get 10 20 bills in all honesty most of its automated payments are gone out out my bank account before I I even probably look at the bill in all honesty oh yeah because it's wallet shock really because honestly if you have three separate bills you're on three separate payment timelines and you don't have to pay triple the amount of money once a month and some people prefer that I don't know whe it stemmed from it was service differentiated so as a new service came online typically you had a new rating and billing platform because the old system was Legacy and you couldn't handle the new service that you were bringing on and it moved that way for a while then it came back to convergence from a localized operator point of view there's no benefit to the consumer I don't think right okay thank you thank you for that I'll have to cut it off at this point but we can certainly take this up again at the coffee break Alice Harris thank you so very much you good luck to you a dis thank you