Call Center Billing | Monetization for Call Centers

Call Center Billing or monetization for call centers refers to rating and charging of users based on the usage of the call center service in terms of actual consumption of various offerings and also paying the plan fees for enabling the services. The call center services typically include live reception, chat, active response, call relaying and these are available for technical support, sales support, and many more areas of business.

The call center services are applicable across industries and more and more companies rely on call centers to outsource their different departments. Call centers fall under the bigger umbrella of BPO or Business Process Outsourcing. While all call centers can essentially be termed as ‘BPO’ entities, the reverse is not true – all BPO entities are not call centers. This difference in mind, let us explore some call center monetization features with EarnBill.

A call center makes a variety of plans available to its customers. The charging on these plans can be based on a fixed monthly subscription or based on a combination of subscription billing and usage consumption billing. EarnBill comes with out of the box features like subscription management, recurring billing, billing mediation, invoicing and automated payment collection that are ideally suited for an end to end billing and revenue management for call centers.

• Billing Plans

The call center offerings typically involve prepaid subscriptions. The user can sign up for a free trial plan and is required to provide some payment instrument as part of the sign up workflow. EarnBill helps store tokenized payment instruments thereby helping to charge the users on completion of their free trial period. The user can opt out of the service at the end of the free trial period.

The billing plans charge periodic subscription fees and provide an included usage along with the bundled toll free numbers. Upon buying additional numbers, the users are charged extra. EarnBill provides features like plans, bundles and pricing models that allow it to set up the billing plans for call centers rather easily.

• Recurring Billing

EarnBill allows businesses to charge plans with different periodic frequencies like monthly, quarterly and annually etc. Its billing core allows to set up daily billing with monthly anniversary billing cycles. This spreads the customer bills across the month and allows for revenue generation throughout the month instead of getting concentrated on one or two days in a month. This helps with a positive cash flow situation for the business.

• Billing Mediation

Call Center services such as Inbound Call Answering services, Chat and Call Relays etc get measured for consumption and need to be charged. Typically, the switch or other underlying telecom component will generate CDRs (Call Data Records) that can be easily processed by EarnBill.

EarnBill can accept different CDR formats, identify the account and the service and charge such service with a rated call. A rated call goes through price identification based on the pricing model defined in EarnBill. This process of rating and charging is also termed as billing mediation. EarnBill’s billing mediation feature is a robust, enterprise grade software service that can scale to process millions of Call Data Records for a call center.

• Invoicing

EarnBill comes with a bill run job that can generate accurate invoices with proper rating and charging of consumption usage. It can also track and apply subscription fees, apply any credit and debit adjustments and calculate taxes as per the country of implementation. EarnBill bill run allows to send the invoices with paper bills or with email (also known as e-bills).

• Payment Collection

EarnBill allows recurring payment instruments such as credit cards and bank accounts in a tokenized mode. This allows businesses to securely collect recurring payments with meeting all security compliance requirements.

• Dunning Notifications

EarnBill allows businesses to track debts of the customer accounts using its ageing job. It can track the customer account status based on non payment of debt, and change the status as per business driven configuration. For example, businesses may define incremental status movement from active to due, from due to overdue, from overdue to suspension warning and finally to suspended status. At each stage, dunning notifications may be sent automatically from the system to the customers.

• Data Migrations

EarnBill comes with useful data migration utilities and APIs that allow you to migrate the data easily from the legacy platform to EarnBill. The data for customer accounts, orders, services, credits, debit adjustments, invoices, payments and balances or debts can be migrated easily into EarnBill.

EarnBill is a complete solution, a platform that provides the flexibility to start your call center business small and grow it big with the same platform allowing you to scale your business seamlessly. Think Call Center Billing Software, think EarnBill!

Here is a case study for a multi brand business communications company in the US.