Case Study – Telecom Billing

This is a case study of a full fledged Telecom Billing System implemented in Australia. This telecom company provides their subscribers with various telecom services, such as mobile services, internet services, fixed line services and voip services. For each type of service, they had 2 or 3 different service providers or carriers who were providing the underlying networks and infrastructure. As such, this Telecom Company can be categorised as an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) if you only consider the mobile services.

All services were essentially postpaid services but with prepaid subscriptions. This means that the calling, mobile data usage and all other services were available to use without there being a prepaid limit. The customers paid for their service at the end of the billing period after receiving the invoice that contained their usage charges and plan fees. On the invoice, the plan fee was charged in advance (prepaid) and the usage charges were as per actual usage charged in arrears (postpaid).

Considering the postpaid nature of usage charges, this case study can be termed as a case study of a postpaid billing solution, also an MVNO billing solution and a multi brand billing solution as there were multiple brands under one company.

However, this Multi Brand Telecom Billing implementation that does not use the multi-tenancy feature of the system, but meets multi-brand requirements through a single tenant. If you would like to go through a case study of multi-tenant billing system solution, please refer this Case Study: Multi-brand Call Center.

The client was using an existing billing system and the data was migrated from the old system to jBilling. A simple set of csv file formats were provided from jBilling side for this purpose. The csv files were generated for customers, subscription orders, one time fees, pending balances, historical invoices, historical payments and recurring payment instruments like credit cards and bank accounts. A standard migration utility was used to load the data coming from these csv files into the jBilling system. 

The following diagram illustrates the phased implementation plan for the solution.

The project started with one of the sub-brands being made live with subscription billing. This sub brand was offering internet services in Australia. It did not have any consumption usage based billing, only the recurring charges for plan fees. This was an easier brand to make live, with only a couple of customisations. The custom works included the payment gateway integration with an Australian Payment Gateway and a customized invoice design and email design with the company branding.

This was the main Telco brand and subscribers were mainly using mobile services, fixed line services, voip services and internet services under this brand. This was the biggest brand too and had a bigger number of subscribers. There were different carriers involved that provided the underlying network infrastructure. These services included subscription as well as usage billing.

There were about 5 carriers catering to various services, with 2 key mobile network operators. The carriers and MNOs provided the mediation files to process the usage charges to the end customers. There were about 12 different mediation file formats.  This implementation required a complete Billing solution with both prepaid and postpaid subscriptions, charges, discounts and fees involved.

At this juncture, the integration with an in house CRM system was made live. This integration mainly included the customer on-boarding, subscribing to a new service, plan change and adding new payment instruments to name a few. Apart from the integration with CRM, there were also new features required to be developed like providing call credits, data pools and associated notification alerts.

A year after going live with the main Telecom brand, another new mobile services brand was launched – pan-Australia. This project involved new branding of the invoices and notification messages. Also, different payment gateway merchant account to collect payments into and changes to support new mobile plans.

This brand was launched within 2 months of initiating the project and has increased the clients business by about 70% in 2 years.

The uniqueness of this Telecom Billing implementation is that it allowed multiple brands to coexist within the same entity (or company in the billing system). The system had the ability to be customized and implemented in a way that the client could acquire different brands and merge them under one entity. Thus till Phase 3, there were 3 different brands merged into the main company and all 3 were live under the same brand. Then in Phase 4, a new brand was launched using the same entity and without using the multi-tenancy of the system.

Here the requirement was such that from a system point of view, all brands needed to be applied with the same business rules and offer similar plans and rates, but for the outside world and customers they were different brands. The system was customized to support this within the same tenant (or entity) and sent different invoice designs and collected payments to different accounts based on the brand.

This phase of the project involved streamlining certain system aspects, resolve certain pending issues and developing new features. Some key improvements and changes are:
1. Show mobile data usage in real time on mobile app and customer portal,
2. Ad hoc credit notes to be applied with real time effect on the customer balance,
3. Payment Collection to retry payments for overdue invoices two times each month, for a period of 3 months for each overdue invoice,
4. Implementing new file based payment gateway integration,
5. International roaming, and,
6. Operational Automation