CALL SERVICES / NUMBERING
The hidden power of voice
Call services have become a hidden gem for partners wishing to protect their margins from erosion. As
specialist vendors continue to innovate the market has become increasingly complex with the maturing of
products which leverage data. Analytics Solutions, Artificial Intelligence, and Billing Engines are all driving the
market forwards to maximise the transition to the cloud
Billing
Why does Billing matter so much now?
e truth is that Billing has always played
a fundamental role in driving reseller
businesses. For Channel Partners, it will
be the most important piece of software
they have within their internal systems.
In a market with tight margins, ensuring
you bill in a timely and accurate manner
could make the dierence between thriving
business and one that is constantly plagued
with cash ow ‘issues’.
With the imminent demise of ISDN
(2025), forward thinking businesses are
looking elsewhere for their multiline
telecoms solutions. Hosted, as we know,
is fast becoming the most prominent
solution and with this comes more and
more bundling of services. From a billing
point of view this means that less and less
calls have an actual end user sales value and
therefore billing systems have to process vast
quantities of calls just to nd the odd few
calls that are out of package and chargeable.
e opportunities to lose revenues
through inaccurate billing are vast and
can be a big stumbling block for channel
partners. Failure to regularly check agreed
carrier pricing and customer rate tables can
be costly, your billing provider should be a
major facilitator in helping you maintain
an appropriate level of cost management or
‘housekeeping.’
A billing engine these days is likely to be
cloud-based for a start, the only reason to
keep your billing on-premise these days is
for compliance reasons.
Whether it be capturing usage records,
call detail records, charging data records,
network trac management data or
anything else, billing platforms are more
multi-faceted than ever before. Rating
consumption to determine further
calculations such as calculating total time
of calls for tari zones, counting short
messages, trac summaries, in order to
BILLING SOLUTIONS SHOULD…
• Have a single point of entry on an integrated single platform that supports billing, provisioning,
CRM, finance and support.
• Have API integration with best of breed third party applications
• Web client access
• Transitioned to a cloud-based service if required
• Reduce errors and cost efficiencies.
• Up to date and synchronised data across all applications.
• Reduce workload for administrators.
• Ensure that the reseller can quickly adapt to market changes or launching new products.
• Help position the reseller as a market leader.
• Be able to scale to meet the growth aspirations of the reseller.
• Come from a nimble provider that can keep up to date with regulatory changes.
10 | Channel Profiles 2019 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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