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you translate time to market into something the business can understand and support? If it takes a month to get a new rate plan in, you probably need to invest in improving that.
Then there’s scale. How long does it take to get through the billing cycle? You’re betting the revenue of the company on this thing called billing, and if you don’t have the capacity to handle your volume and be able to catch up or adjust when things go wrong, you need to fix that. You need to have a quality assurance process that lets you back the mistakes out. You also need to understand what the cost is to run this thing. What’s your cost per bill? How do you benchmark this thing to ensure that it gives value to the business? This is the heartbeat of the company. If you don’t bill, there’s no money, so you need to get this right.
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“If you want to make software more reliable, have it do less.” |
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LeFave: You actually need to back that up the chain. It’s rarely the case that someone was billed wrong. The machines, the processes, the rate plans – they don’t typically bill wrong. You have to back up the channel and look at what the customer was sold, how they were sold, and who set the expectations. One of the most valuable tools is the welcome call where you go over everything with the customer. It all gets back to selling. It’s very rare that you find there’s a bad code line or rate plan or duplicate billing because there’s plenty of oversight there.
You have to follow the chain and the lifecycle. If any one piece is broken or not performing, it looks like billing is broken. It all
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I think overall that simplification is probably the most important value. If anything, complexity causes you problems in care and in rolling out products. You need to look at these products in terms of whether they are relevant to the market. There may be price plans that just aren’t healthy business propositions and they need to be retired. Good marketing departments should know what their top 10 and bottom 10 products are. One of the most important things you do before you do a billing conversion is to clean up the rate plans. Rate plan rationalization is key; get your number down. Every rate plan you have to convert is going to cost you money. The less there is to convert the less it costs.
Finegold: Simplification definitely makes sense, given how complexity often creates the risks that lead to failure. So why does every customer satisfaction study I see point to billing error and confusion as the major contributors to poor customer relationships? Why do we allow these problems to persist and just throw more complexity in the form of band-aid technologies at them?
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depends on the quality of the service and the experience of the customer. How simple is it for the customer to come in, buy a product, use the product, and get billed for it. If you make it too complicated – even with the best intentions – then you’re lighting the fuse. Care is really the biggest issue for any telecom company. Think about why people call. They call because of handset problems, coverage problems, and billing problems. But all of this is aggravated by things like complicated care engagements and IVR systems that are meant to handle volume. These are band-aids meant to treat the symptoms, but they add to the complexity. The best term I know to describe why things are done this way is that you’re changing the tires on the truck while it’s rolling down the highway. If you could stop the truck that would be great – but who can do that? You can’t stop billing. But when you start making changes you poke the customer. You poke the bee hive and so you start having issues.
For example, one of the big areas of concern is changing a bill format. You spend a lot of
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