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Telecom Billing Trends 2019
The document discusses billing trends and the demand for all-in-one solutions in business support systems (BSS) and operation support systems (OSS) among organizations. It highlights the need for integrated applications to streamline activities like invoicing, order management, and customer interactions, while addressing challenges such as data errors and compliance. Key topics include automation, customizable features, agent commissions, and technology integration to enhance efficiency and customer experience.
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Telecom Billing Trends 2019
- 1. TimelyBill.com BILLING TRENDS Luke Crissy Directorof Sales, TimelyBill
- 2. TimelyBill.com TERMINOLOGY • BSS (BusinessSupport Systems) – CRM Customer Relationship Management – Quoting – Finance – Invoice processing and payment collection – Taxation • OSS (Operation Support Systems) – Order mgmt., Workflow – Provisioning, Ticketing – Facilities, Network Monitoring – Inventory and tracking
- 3. TimelyBill.com TODAY’S BILLING /BACK-OFFICE • Organizations use an array of applications – Core application by an established provider – Home grown solutions* – 3rd party applications – Combination of all of these • WHAT HAPPENS – Communication between applications – Swivel chair doing double entry, error prone – Middleware – Empire building – Key personnel exit with intellectual property
- 4. TimelyBill.com REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION WHATCUSTOMERS ARE ASKING FOR • 22% ALL-IN-ONE • 11% TAXATION • 11% PROVISIONING • 10% MULTI-ORG • 10% AGENTS • 7% TICKETING • 6% COMMISSIONING • 6% INVENTORY ALL-IN-ONE 22% TAXATION 11% PROVISIONING 11% MULTi/ORG 10% AGENTS 10% TICKETING 7% COMMISSION 6% INVENTORY 6% PORTAL 5% CRM 4% ORDER 4% REPORTING 4%
- 5. TimelyBill.com ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION • Organizationsare looking for a single application that can incorporate multiple BSS & OSS functions ALL-IN-ONE 22% TAXATION 11% PROVISIONING 11% MULTi/ORG 10% AGENTS 10% TICKETING 7% COMMISSION 6% INVENTORY 6% PORTAL 5% CRM 4% ORDER 4% REPORTING 4%
- 6. TimelyBill.com SINGLE-STACK • Why isthis happening? • Who us asking? – CSPs, MSPs, Landlords • Usage & Taxation • APIs • Depth of Product
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- 8. TimelyBill.com QUOTES - CUSTOMIZATION •Single format • Customer Base expansion • Customizable communications – One size doesn’t fit all – Template driven / Self care – OTHER CORRESPONDENCE — Other customer touch points - email, invoices and portals
- 9. TimelyBill.com QUOTES • BUNDLING Allowsusers the ability to create value – Present as a single line item or broken out individually Parent/Child type format • DISCOUNTING – Global level - Based on the overall amount of the quote. – Line item level Discount individual Product/Services – Dollar value or percentage? Apply to RC & NRC? • TAXATION Accurate taxation and proration
- 10. TimelyBill.com QUOTES - CONFIGURATORS •Rules based configuration options • Dynamically driven GUIs • Reduces potential for error
- 11. TimelyBill.com ELECTRONIC SIGNATURE • Quoteto Order faster • Need a signature to proceed • eSignature integration increases efficiency
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- 13. TimelyBill.com ORDER MANAGEMENT • Complexorders – Fiber DIA, DIDs, phone minutes, plus other hardware • Process individual items into active Products and services. • Capability for immediate invoice creation • Fiber DIA: – Schedule a bill start date – automagically! • Orders to Workflow.
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- 15. TimelyBill.com AUTOMATED PROVISIONING • Switchingplatform integration • Automatic activation of services from Order Management – Activate/Terminate/Suspend/Resume • BENEFITS – Eliminate intermediate steps – no need to create a Ticket. – Reduce technical expertise required. – Decrease the time to activation – Eliminate potential for error • LEGACY DEVICES – the more one can automate…
- 16. TimelyBill.com BILLING • CUSTOMIZED BILLPRESENTMENT – Present differing looks & data sets for different types of customers • UNIQUE MESSAGE INSERTION – Upcoming maintenance events, specials, cross-promotions • UN-BILL / REBILL • INVOICE GROUPS – Large enterprises want to see their invoices broken down not only by location but also view them by department.
- 17. TimelyBill.com TAXATION / COMPLIANCE •Integrated Taxing component • Regulators are constantly finding creative ways to tax the consumer • Incorrect reporting is far too costly • Safe Harbor Override ALL-IN-ONE 22% TAXATION 11% PROVISIONING 11% MULTi/ORG 10% AGENTS 10% TICKETING 7% COMMISSION 6% INVENTORY 6% PORTAL 5% CRM 4% ORDER 4% REPORTING 4%
- 18. TimelyBill.com COLLECTIONS/DUNNING • Streamlined customerinteraction for AR • AUTOMATIC TRIGGERS: Has a threshold have been met or exceeded? Whether by balance/aging? • CUSTOMIZED CORRESPONDENCES: Populate email template with information based on predefined events. Additional commands. – 1st action: (EMAIL) > Hey your payment was missed! – 2nd action: (EMAIL + FEE) > A late fee has automatically been applied to your open balance – 3rd action: (EMAIL + PROVISIONING) > If a threshold is met, services can be suspended • Lock out a user from an account • SUSPEND commands sent to switch • Can even go as far as automagically “Resume” services when payment is made – 4TH ACTION: (EMAIL + PROVISIONING + TASK) > Services have been terminated and your account has been referred to collections
- 19. TimelyBill.com CUSTOMER PORTALS • Improvethe customer experience & maximize that interaction time – Access to data in multiple formats – Integrated Trouble Ticketing – Store multiple payment options – Customizable – branding & navigation – Self care • Existing & new customers – Ordering - Rules based configurator ALL-IN-ONE 22% TAXATION 11% PROVISIONING 11% MULTi/ORG 10% AGENTS 10% TICKETING 7% COMMISSION 6% INVENTORY 6% PORTAL 5% CRM 4% ORDER 4% REPORTING 4%
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- 21. TimelyBill.com AGENTS / COMMISSIONS Howto get people to sell for you? YOU PAY THEM! • PORTALS: – Branding required and afford some customization – Detailed account information / Historical view / Data export – Ability to quote, sell and track orders – Disbursements: Authorize, track and pay out of the application – Chargebacks – Dedicated public IP
- 22. TimelyBill.com PLUG-IN TECHNOLOGY • Providesa method for components to be developed outside of the native methodology and then be “plugged-in” to the core system thereby expanding it’s current integrations. • Allows customers to implement new functionality, or third-party integrations, without engaging custom development from the platform provider directly. •
- 23. TimelyBill.com REST ACTIONS REST Actionsconfiguration tool • Implemented as a central REST actions configuration tool for building re-usable REST commands for integration with 3rd party APIs. • Allows one to pre-build commands that are to be sent to other applications. Includes capability for variable population from key data objects, employs detailed logging of commands sent as well as responses received, and has capabilities to hide sensitive information such as passwords and tokens.
- 24. TimelyBill.com THAT’S A WRAP •TEMPLATIZATION • RULES BASED METHODOLOGY • PLUG-IN TECHNOLOGY • REST ACTIONS • SINGLE STACK
Editor's Notes
- #2 To echo the other presenters, I’d like to thank CSI for a wonderful event thus far and providing us opportunity to share observations as it refers to…Billing Trends. So again, my name is LDC and I have a title that states Director of Sales. Says it right there on the screen and I see it printed on my business card. But lets jump in shall we? We set the baseline with some terminology.
- #3 ACRONYMS - Our industry, like many others, is fraught with acronyms!! BSS or Business Support Systems, usually refers to Customer interaction, or financial side of the house. CRM Customer Relationship Management, Quoting, Finance, Invoice processing and payment collection, Taxation OSS or Operation Support Systems contains items that are inherent within an organizations Operational space. Order mgmt., Workflow, Provisioning, Ticketing, Facilities, Network Monitoring, Inventory and tracking. I think you’ll find sometimes these 2 terms mixed/mingled and as far as trends go – we see them definitely blending.
- #4 Organizations have traditionally utilized a wide range of applications to run their companies. Kind of like a POT LUCK dinner - Couldn’t find the right icon so I used the maze instead! Some back offices are definitely a maze – OR amazing- right!! Core application usually by a seasoned or established application provider. HOME GROWN - Then there are the home grown developed by an employee or someone’s nephew or uncle. ASTERISK - I mean no offense to anyone in the room!! These apps have obviously gotten you this far! 3RD PARTY - Then there are the new 3rd party applications. Shiny new object with Slick GUI’s – right - promise the world. Depending upon where you are in your growth cycle, you most likely use a combination of all of these. SITUATIONS THAT ARISE Communication between applications or really the lack thereof SWIVEL CHAIR - people doing double entry. Creates a situation that is ripe for errors. MIDDLEWARE - In an attempt to streamline their delivery process, these are bound together by even more software, or middleware as it is commonly referred to. Maybe some other trappings – Empire building – I’m going to make things so complicated that the place can’t run without me! Sometimes key personnel exit with intellectual property…sometimes it’s not a pretty sight. But hey – we’re here to talk about trends. Sorry – we’re not going to talk about 5G and IoT. I know some of you will be disappointed but don’t get up and walk out!!
- #5 REQUESTS FOR MORE INFORMATION For todays presentation – I brought forth data from what would be considered local type players which I think is a great for this audience. This is a non-scientific approach. We did not pay anyone! Info is base this off inquiries we’ve received and I believe many of our competitors would see the same type of trend. SPELL OUT THE LIST The rest are 5% and under. Were going to talk about some of these and in no particular order.
- #6 So here’s a trend! ALL-IN-ONE IS ALMOST 25% of inquiries. More and more, Organizations are looking for a single application that can incorporate multiple BSS & OSS functions What are they looking to do? Looking to increase efficiencies and hopefully decrease the monthly outlay. I’ll bet if we looked at this same chart several years ago, I guarantee each piece of the pie would be much larger. THE SOLUTION IS WHAT WE REFER TO AS THE SINGLE STACK
- #7 HERE IT IS Previously, when people were looking for solutions, you’d never hear Quoting and Provisioning mentioned in the same sentence. But now, as our pie chart reflects, providers want these, or as many that makes sense, under a single user interface. BSS & OSS – playing together. The point being that nowadays, the lines are blurred. Technology has allowed carriers and vendors alike to provide a full suite of services and software all the way to the desktop. Providers need fewer interfaces to deliver and manage a broader product set. WHO IS ASKING Relative to trends, many new players are entering the telecom billing space. CSPs – Communication Service Providers - obviously MSPs – Many more inquiries from Managed Service providers. They manage a customers entire network but not the Voice? They’ll get the blame a lot of the time and are even asked to help fix the problem!! In the end, the phone is an IP device with a MAC address. Stop leaving $ on the table. Landlords – I’ve let the fiber company extend their networks into my space. Why not get in on that action!! USAGE AND TAXATION Everything is great until they run into Usage based services & taxation. Up until now, they have been doing all of their billing thru QuickBooks and the world was fine. Along comes the opportunity to sell VoIP. They start reselling some flat rate, all you can eat services and pass along any taxation to the consumer - life is still good. All of a sudden, they grow and now have the opportunity to "own" the customer. They get their own platform and now have a need to bill for usage based services, and even better yet, they need to know all about taxation! Always good to have a platform that is integrated to a stellar tax provider who can also provide a speedy tax engine but one who can also provide consultative and compliance services. APIs Understandable that in some cases, customer will want, or need, to utilize an existing application. Inter-connects And MSPs are usually heavily leveraged using apps like TigerPaw or Connectwise. There’s a small application in the CRM space you may or may not have heard of – Salesforce. For some companies – it’s just not going away so. Any solution needs to have the ability to interface with 3rd party apps seamlessly, securely and automatically with as little manual intervention as possible. And deal with updates. DEPTH You’ve heard the term – “Jack of all trades, Master of none” - last thing you want is to start peeling back the layers of an application only to find out that it’s beauty is only skin deep! It’s gotta work! You can’t trade simplicity for functionality so there’s got to be depth of product. Call it what you want - ALL IN ONE, HYBRID, CONVERGED, ALL UNDER ONE ROOF – We’ll call it the SINGLE STACK! Now we want to get into the weeds a little and start talking about some of the individual pieces of the stack and expose some trends on a more granular level. We’ll start with Quoting…
- #8 Where is quoting? Funny thing is, it didn’t even make the list from what customers are asking for yet we see a very big need for certain functionality when it comes to Quoting.
- #9 The reasons why… SINGLE FORMAT Companies often do business within a specific vertical whether it be the commercial space or just residential. They can get away with having a single quote format – right? EXPAND THEIR BASE: Providers these days want, or need, to expand their base of services to other segments of the market or different verticals altogether. ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL: One shouldn’t have to take the time to alter each and every quote to fit the needs. Providers want to be ability to present differing looks and data sets for each customer they are communicating with. You’ll want an entirely different set of data to appear on your wholesale customer’s quote and maybe a very thorough breakout of products and services on your direct to consumer deliverable. TEMPLATES: Looking for Template driven tools. This allows for consistency in your presentation and reduces the time to get quotes into a prospect or an existing customer’s hands. They also want the ability to do this themselves. They don’t need to go back and get hit with a $250 fee every time they want a change. OTHER CORRESPONDENCE: The trend is not just limited to Quoting - This is true for the other customer touch points such as eMail, Invoices (not just changing a logo) and Portals. SLIDE
- #10 STAYING IN THE QUOTE PHASE As service providers grow or expand, they are sometimes pushed to broaden their portfolio of services. Or competition is forcing a price war. Whatever the reason, they eventually get to a point whereby they need to get creative on how services are offered. BUNDLING: Allows users the ability to create a value. Whether it’s perceived or actual is up to you!! COMMENT: Love it when things you seek to buy are presented as a bundle but when you add them up, they’re the same price – no discount. You actually pay more for shipping handling. So the bundling is a key trend we see. Some providers want to have them appear as a single Line Item. May not want a customer to see the underlying structure of an offering. Other want them broken out individually DISCOUNTING: Global level, Line item level, Dollar value or percentage base, NRC and RC charges?? Trend is for all of these! TAXATION: Don’t forget, sometimes the items you want to bundle usually can be sold as individual products/services. Very important consideration in regards to taxation and commissioning of these types of offerings. Comes to light even larger when it comes time for the finance team needs to make an adjustment or apply a credit. Need to be able to be pro-rate accordingly and presented intelligently on the invoice.
- #11 Salesman will sell just about anything if it’s not tied down and produces a commission. Once the ink hits the paper, the engineering/technical department is expected to deliver the services in a reasonable timeframe – which is yesterday. And the accounting dept is then expected to be able to create and invoice for myriad of services, again from multiple sources, and make sure it’s taxed properly and most importantly, commissioned properly!! We’ve been seeing a lot of call for Rules Based Configuration options. If an employee selects a particular product/service on one screen, based on that selection, the screen “underneath” is dynamically altering the options that will be presented next. Only those items that are applicable are then presented. Maybe an easier analogy is let’s say one sells Premise and Cloud based services. When I choose a head-end, say the Mitel SBE 100, the application now only provides hardware relative to that model. Drastically reduces the potential for incorrectly placing hardware on a quote that doesn’t belong. Not that that has ever happened!!
- #12 ELIMINATE?? You'd be surprised how many companies still don't have this for their customers. Face to face time is crucial for companies that are selling particular Products/Services. For some it’s a necessary step in a normal sales cycle. But when the dance is complete, you want to efficiently get a Quote turned into an Order and the only way to do that is with a signature. Being integrated with an established Electronic Signature provider is a powerful tool that can increases efficiency. It doesn’t make the chart but it’s an important feature providers want.
- #13 Now we’ve got a signed quote!
- #14 ORDER MANAGEMENT: Getting everything ready, delivered and activated so billing can commence under a single start date is utopia. Most of the time that just doesn’t happen. Fiber gets installed 2 weeks early, half of the phones are backordered or shipped to the wrong location so the usually the acct department ends up eating some portion somewhere. Prospects are looking for applications that allows for order processing on a “selective” basis. Can’t just be an all or nothing proposition. Selling a package that has a Fiber DIA, DIDs, Phone package with minutes, plus other Hardware. Until the fiber gets installed, you can’t start billing for those particular services – but you do want to get paid for other hardware that is say shipped today. Order mgmt. system needs to be able to process individual line items into Active Products or basically show it as sold, and be able to produce an invoice dated the same day. Now, going back to the Fiber. Lets say the underlying carrier gave you a FoC date of 10 days – OK, more like 45 days! Off that same Order we’re working from, people want the ability to designate a future start date of that service and therefore billing will commence on that date in the future. They want this to happen automatically without the need to go back and make sure the billing actually started. ORDER MANAGEMENT NEEDS TO BE CONFIGURABLE AND HAVE A ROBUST FEATURE SET This is a nice transition to provisioning.
- #15 That was a nice segue to Provisioning. Tied for 2nd place. Customers are looking to automate the activation of services right out of the Order Mgmt system. What’s needed to accomplish that? It’s called Provisioning.
- #16 IT SHOULD REALLY SAY “AUTOMATED PROVISIONING” BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT IS A common question we receive is what switching platforms does your software integrate with? If it’s a single stack the more the merrier! But what they’re really looking to automate are common, and sometimes complex functions, and for the software to provide the communication exchange to their switching platform. Not a person, but the software. Some common features we see asked for are Activate/Terminate/Suspend/Resume BENEFITS TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS – AND WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT Eliminate intermediate steps – no need to create a Ticket. Reduce technical expertise required. Reduces /eliminates the potential for error Decrease the time to activation The trend we see for Automated provisioning to not just to newer switches, but also to other LEGACY DEVICES that might be on ones network. The system needs to have the ability to communicate using older or differing methodologies is important too. ftp, http, sql, telnet, LDAP, Rest pushes
- #17 CUSTOMIZED BILL PRESENTMENT Alluded to this previous in Quotes. Providers want to be ability to present differing looks and data sets for different types of customers. For your business customers, you want a very detailed invoice with all products, all services and call detail... You’ll want an entirely different set of data to appear on your wholesale customer’s invoice and then another streamlined version to you direct to consumer invoice Again, flexibility is the objective with the consistency being the result. UNIQUE MESSAGE INSERTION: Looking for the ability to insert unique messages. Upcoming maintenance events, specials. Attach other documentation to an invoice. Maybe cross-promotional information. UN-BILL: Adjustments are always tough to handle. Customers want the ability to un-bill completely, make adjustments and rebill. INVOICE GROUPS: One key feature we’re being asked for is the ability to break out invoices using different criteria. Some providers have enterprise customers with many locations but want to see their invoices broken down by department, but also by address.
- #18 Another #2 on our top ten list for today is Taxation!! As you can see, a built-in taxing component is highly sought after. New technology brings new products and regulators are constantly finding creative ways to tax the consumer. Consistent updates to your taxing database is paramount. Incorrect reporting is far too costly so your solution must have a reliable, trusted tax partner. OVERRIDE SAFE HARBOR One the trends we see here. Many customers are looking to see if the system is capable to send overrides to the Safe Harbor percentages. Customers will perform a traffic study to establish a true rate, then request a change to the rate on their production platform. This allows them to increase revenue at the same time their customers overall invoice amount is staying the same or even reducing. Creative is the key term here!
- #19 Also looking for ways to streamline interaction with customer base from an AR perspective. How can they efficiently deal with the tedious nature of collections which has traditionally been a very manual process. Run a report, see who hasn’t paid, call/harass the customer, chasing sizeable amounts of cash. Looking for automation in this area. TRIGGERS: Has a threshold have been met or exceeded? Whether by balance/aging?? CUSTOMIZED CORRESPONDENCES: Using business rules, the billing contact info will be pulled into an email template populated with varying information based on predefined events. 1st action: (EMAIL) > Hey your payment was missed! 2nd action: (EMAIL + FEE) > A late fee has automatically been applied to your open balance. 3rd action: (EMAIL + PROVISIONING) > If a subsequent threshold is met, services can be Suspended. Everyone knows - nothing makes the AR depts phone ring quicker than when a service gets suspended! Lock out a user from an account SUSPEND commands sent to switch Can even go as far as automagically “Resume” services when payment is made with no manual intervention. 4TH ACTION: (EMAIL + PROVISIONING + TASK) > Thanks for your business. Services have been Terminated and by the way, your account has been referred to a Collections agency!
- #20 Outside of the traditional information one would expect to be made available via of a customer portal, service providers are looking to not only improve the customer experience but also maximize that interaction time. From a customer perspective, there are the obvious expectations one wants of their Portal: Overview of active services / Current and historical invoices / Ability to make a payment and access to payment history… What we see trending is a couple of items: DATA FORMATS: Users need access to their data AND they want it in differing formats.. Excel/CSV/PDF/Word… TROUBLE TICKETS: Integrated Trouble Ticketing with ongoing correspondence. PAYMENT OPTIONS: Capability to store multiple payment options and establish a Primary. CUSTOMIZATION: Customer logo. Change some navigation (obviously with limits) – add some links to 3rd party sites for example. ORCHESTRATION: Order Orchestration is becoming an integral part of the Customer Self Care process. Basically, this is taking the Configurator mindset we had back on Quoting, and putting it on steroids. This allows for SELF CARE - EXISTING CUSTOMERS - What I really want to hone in on though is a term we hear more and more called Customer “self-care”. It’s an expectation these days for an end user of a VoIP service, to have the ability to change certain features: Call Forwarding, Twinning (Ring my desk phone and my cell), ringing sounds… What we see happening is that service providers want to make their customers even more self-sufficient. This is a 2 way street as we also see consumers are very tech savvy (SOME ARE? MANY ARE!!) anyway, they want the ability to manage as much as possible without interaction! ORDERING: Very big push towards this. Ability to acquire additional products/services. Need another Ext. Includes the phone, DID, licensing…place an order for common services without an act of congress. Just drop ship the phone, and no one gets hurt! Here are your new products…here is your one time costs (NRC) and you are increasing your MRC by $$ each month – you OK with this? GREAT! An order is automagically created and assigned to the person, or Queue, responsible for pulling product, and a shipping label has been printed and product is drop shipped – DONE AND DONE. The service provider is also looking for automation on the Provisioning process as well. Maybe for whatever reason, it takes 3 weeks for the customer to get the phone set up. But when the order was processed internally, the application kicked off several independent tasks. Pulls X number of phones from inventory and now tracks the MAC address’. It then sends commands to the switching platform, it increases the license count by X for this customer, assigns the DID and activate the Ext with end user info. It is also been negotiated that billing won’t commence until the phone actually gets installed or becomes active/in use. I am understating this some-what but one gets the idea of how providers are looking for automation of, I won’t say simple, but core tasks, which frees up staff to work more complex issues. SELF CARE - NEW CUSTOMERS That’s for existing customers – what about new customers? Gets even more complex but this is what we see providers are asking for. RULES BASED CONFIGURATOR: They’ve bought into your marketing efforts and have come to your site. Need to have a secure front end that can accept/gather as much detail as the end user will provide! When they get to the point where they want to purchase goods/services, they want that selection process to be an intuitive experience. Meaning, based on certain criteria a consumer enters, the application presents you only with relative options. Say you are in a certain zip code and you want to buy the Premium Plus. You go through a few screens and the system provides you with a specific set of options/pricing. But then you decide though to go back, you won’t need the router let’s say because that’s something you decide to provide yourself. From this point now, the system now needs to present options ala carte because the original item you selected can only be bought if you buy the entire “package”. MORE WITH LESS: They’re looking to provide many options without the need to engage a sales agent. SELF CARE: As you see, this is needed on the front end as well as the BACK!
- #21 As you can see, the capability to facilitate Agents has a high percentage on our table SLIDE as does Commissioning. These items intersect in many places so we’ll bundle them and address them concurrently.
- #22 How do you get people to sell for you? Wine and dine them?? Promise them untold riches??? YOU PAY THEM! Long gone are the days where the sales manager sets a percentage on an Account and just calls it a day. In some organizations, a salesperson is 100% commission based so their livelihood is fully dependent on their ability to produce and the companies ability to track. Many companies decide that the best growth model is by utilizing agents or channel model. Consumers are asking for very flexible and robust product set which in turn requires a feature rich application to commission their representatives. So whether one is paying internal sales people or Agents, providers need to get quite creative when it comes to retaining talent. A decent residual and/or a timely SPIFF can’t hurt but, it always helps to disburse any commission that is owed on time and accurately. PORTAL: Has to be able to be branded with some customization afforded/ Present detailed account information / Historical views / Data export capabilities SELL – TREND One of the more frequent asks we see here is the ability to quote, sell and then also track orders. Especially important if the product is able to be processed with little fanfare. DISBURSEMENTS: Authorize, track and pay out of the application. CHARGEBACKS – how does the system handle/track commissions if chargeback occurs. How does that look once imported to the upstream accounting package. DEDICATED PUBLIC IP: So you are voipisfun.com. Cannot ask end users to go to a domain like www.paymybill.com and not expect some raised eyebrows and hesitation. They want to use something within “their” domain like www.voipisfun.com/billing which requires the application provider to afford a dedicated public IP address. Need to present a seamless, secure experience especially to someone you are asking to give out personal and payment information How do you get someone to sell your product? I believe that nothing will encourage your agents to promote & produce more than TIMELY payments! SHAMELESS PLUG
- #23 Plug-In: One of the items that we see as deserving a bright spotlight is what we refer to as Plug-In technology. This provides a method for components to be developed outside of the applications native methodology and then be “plugged-in” to the core system, thereby expanding it’s current integration capabilities. This will allow customers to implement new functionality, or third-party integrations, without engaging custom development projects with the platform provider. One example of how this could be leveraged would be if the Number ordering component was exposed as a plug-in – say you have support for Bandwidth, but not Intelequint. If you want to allow ordering of Intelequent numbers from the app just like Bandwidth, you could request the development of the plug-in from the provider. Then, Intelequint, your in-house development staff or even a 3rd party can write to the Plug-In. Another scenario - lets say CSI produces some enhancement on their API that your company wants to take advantage of, but TimelyBIll doesn’t plan to integrate that functionality based on our customer base. You could create a replacement plug-in for CSI, allowing your CSI transactions to process differently from any other customer using the CSI engine. Overall this functionality would allow TimelyBill’s concept of a single-stack back office solution to expand beyond the confines of what TimelyBill can build into the solution ourselves.
- #24 REST Actions: Developed as a central REST actions configuration tool for building re-usable REST commands for integration with 3rd party APIs. Allows one to pre-build commands that are to be sent to other applications. It includes capability for variable population from key data objects, employs detailed logging of commands sent, and well as responses received, and has capabilities to hide sensitive information such as passwords and tokens. We implemented this into a Workflow rules engine and will be integrated into Workflow packages and Provisioning plans. A real would example: Let’s say you use a 3rd party to survey customers after closing support tickets. You can create a REST Action that contains all the configuration information necessary to connect to the 3rd party and transmit the appropriate customer and ticket details. You then create a workflow rule that spells out the specific criteria you are looking for; Trouble ticket is saved, status is closed, customer email address exists. You also assign the REST action. After configured each time a ticket is saved, the conditions will be checked and when matched will trigger the API command(s) to be sent to the 3rd party. Both the command sent and response received are recorded and searchable for auditing purposes. Is advanced functionality that customer are looking for!
- #25 THAT’S A WRAP TEMPLATIZATION The ability to configure and customize correspondences for different customer types - Quotes, Invoices and eMail. RULES BASED Needing to deliver a rules based engine to interpret information and dynamically manipulate data across the stack PLUG-IN Provides a method for components to be developed outside of the native application. This will get “plugged-in” to the core system, thereby expanding it’s current integration capabilities. REST Actions A configuration tool for building re-usable REST commands for integration with 3rd party APIs. SINGLE STACK Providers are asking for a broader feature set using a single or as few interfaces as possible. THANK YOU!! Any questions? Crickets WAV file….