Billing & Revenue Management for a Multi-Brand Business Communications Company

About the Client

This is a case study of a multi-brand, multi-country product company with much of their business based on answering services catering to different sectors. Call Centers for businesses and franchises, Live Call Answering for Legal and Medical fields, business phone systems, and a lead qualification service. The client also encompasses multiple apps and tools that help in remote, collaborative working: Workforce Tracking Tool, Video Calling App, Appointment Scheduling App, Chat Support, and IVR for businesses.

Other areas include products that help with employee training, helping teams communicate online when working remotely, and a customer communication solution that allows analysis of web traffic, building relationships with visitors, and improving customer satisfaction.

All in all, they have a multitude of offerings providing solutions for effective communications in different areas of business.

The Challenge

The client required a billing and revenue management system that could cater to different requirements coming from a variety of products. There was a bit of unknown area in terms of how the requirements would pan out in the future. There was a need for a flexible, customisable system that could manage multiple brands in multiple countries, with different currencies and different taxation structures.

Most of their offerings or products are subscription-based and require usage charging with plans, bundles, and included minutes for various kinds of calls or usage. Their customers are primarily businesses. So it involves B2B selling. They engage with agents who are involved in selling these offerings, and need tracking of their commissions based on the sales achieved.

For the brands that encompass answering services, each customer may buy multiple subscriptions. For example, a business in the US may buy 150 toll-free numbers from the US-based brand and use those 150 different toll-free numbers for different purposes. This will lead to call traffic for sales inquiries and technical support on different numbers. All the calls are answered by live agents, tracked, mediated, and charged. The process of CDR upload (Call Data Records) was to be centralised through a unified job for all brands.

The client needed to integrate the billing system with their different platforms and brands. The integrations involved talking to their customer portals, provisioning systems, mobile apps, and different product platforms. Functions such as mediation, invoicing, charging (payment collection), and ageing are to be directly handled within the billing engine. Whereas provisioning (integration with physical infrastructure or networks) is handled by the client's systems.

Although mediation is centralised, the billing and collection processes were to be driven and executed brand by brand due to different branding of businesses in each country. The multiple time zones at play meant that billing operations were always going to be a challenge. The client's preference was to have all subscriptions prepaid as they slowly moved all their brands to monthly anniversary billing. Which means billing jobs to be executed on a daily basis.

The Solution

The client chose the Enterprise jBilling platform as their billing system because of its flexibility to handle the complex billing use cases and its ease of customisation. It is very easy to extend the core functionality or change the default behaviour in multiple use cases by simply adding a new plugin for the desired functionality. The Enterprise jBilling system also supports usage charging through its billing mediation module.

A live answering service comes into effect when a call is made from an interested party to the client's tenant. The call is tracked for the duration and recorded into a CDR (Call Data Record) file by the client's system. The CDR files are fed into the jBilling system and processed via a unified Job Launcher, which is common for all brands. The Billing Mediation job is configured in the parent company. However, the job identifies the brand based on the toll-free number and applies the usage on the relevant customer account of the brand.

There are different usage types such as Live Call Answering, Chat, Quick Response Service, and IVR. Each of the usage types is configured as part of the product catalogue and included minutes are provided for them as part of the plan. A Mediation Rating and Increments feature allows incrementing and rounding the call quantity based on different increment and rounding rules, which can be specified for each brand differently.

The Results

What seemed like a complex multi-country, multi-brand, and multi-currency implementation was easily managed with jBilling as the billing engine. The billing platform's ability to be extended easily with its plugin-based architecture and its integration capability made the implementation simpler than it was. A dedicated team, with in-depth domain knowledge and technical capabilities, remained available for many years. Both teams worked together and achieved great results. The client is next expanding its business offerings and its customer base, creating new avenues for all stakeholders.

Key Learnings