PICC Billing Functionality Can Prevent Revenue Loss

So, you’re in the initial stage of revising your billing system to handle Pre-subscribed Inter-exchange Carrier Charge (PICC) billing. Or perhaps you want to buy or build an entirely new billing system, complete with PICC billing functionality. No matter what your plans, to fully understand what’s involved with PICC billing, both the carrier and the billing vendor must understand how the PIC Customer Account Record Exchange (CARE) process aligns with a carrier’s business strategy.

PIC CARE records are an integral part of provisioning long distance service to a new or existing line in an IXC’s billing system, and contain, as the name implies, customer account information. For instance, CARE records contain information about a long-distance call that’s exchanged between the LEC and the IXC. The CARE record can identify the IXC that carries long-distance traffic for that line. The type of long-distance call is also coded in the CARE record using a jurisdictional indicator. The IXC sends a CARE record to the LEC, which updates the line data and fires a response CARE record back to the IXC.

PICC a good place to plug revenue leakage

The PICC is a flat, per-line fee that the LEC charges a customer’s IXC. The charge is applied to all lines at a business or residential customer’s location. Though the PICC functionality is not exactly the most exciting part of a telecom billing system, it cannot be overlooked. Carriers can potentially lose hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in missed PIC charges.

Implementing PICC billing is still relatively new and represents a minefield of challenges. Although handling PICC billing may differ for each IXC, there are common functionality requirements:

The line type indicator identifies the kind of line or lines a customer uses. The key source for this data is the CARE record sent by the LEC to the IXC. The line type indicator will also be in the customer data used to set up new accounts and services. To audit accurately, it’s vital to know what code the LEC uses for its line type indicator. Therefore, the ability to capture the line type indicator from the CARE record and compare it against the account vastly improves the end PICC functionality. Because CARE records should be stored for the life of the customer’s contract, adequate storage capacity and functionality is important and enhances the PICC billing system’s ability to handle data effectively.

Storing the correct jurisdiction indicator

The jurisdiction indicator identifies the kind of long-distance call the line carries for the caller. The indicator is usually entered during ordering and can be retrieved from the CARE record sent by the LEC. The jurisdictional indicator, used with the line type, helps the billing system correctly assess the proper PIC charge.

For instance, in a “split”-PIC environment, with different carriers for interstate and intrastate traffic, an IXC may decide to offer:

? only inter-LATA service with international (PIC-1),
? inter-LATA service and/or international service (PIC-2), or
? inter-LATA service, intra-LATA service and international service (PIC-3).

The call offerings differ from customer to customer and from call to call, so the jurisdictional indicator for each line must be accurately captured and tracked.

Determining the correct charge

The key to an IXC billing the correct PIC charge to resellers is having accurate line types and jurisdictional indicators for use by the billing system. Even when these are accurate, knowing which charge or charges apply (interstate, intrastate or both) can be complex for average IXC billing systems.

A rule of thumb for receiving PIC charges from the LEC is this: Whoever carries the interstate or inter-LATA traffic gets billed the PIC charges. Unfortunately, this pertains only to Federal Communications Commission-regulated interstate inter-LATA traffic. LECs can file state-level tariffs with state public utilities or public service commissions to assess intra-LATA PIC charges. But the FCC regulations don’t cover all IXCs offering split-PIC.

For IXCs offering split-PIC there’s no easy way out when it comes to determining whether to charge one, two or even three separate PIC charges per line. It all comes down to knowing which tariffs the LEC filed with the state and building your rating logic accordingly.

Handling PICC disputes

If you are an IXC, your PICC billing must adequately handle reseller disputes. The disputes can range from blaming LECs for using the incorrect line type, to claiming the caller is not the reseller’s customer. Disputes involving resellers will involve hundreds or thousands of lines. It is critical to have procedures in place to handle disputes of this size.

When do you change the line type indicator and start billing the correct amount? If you want to start billing the correct PIC charge right away and avoid waiting for a correction from the LEC, you should probably store two line type indicators. The CARE or LEC line type indicator should only be changed based on direction from the LEC. The “billable’ line type indicator, which the billing system would use to determine the correct PICC rate to bill, should only be changed by the internal group responsible for reseller dispute management.

Having two PICC line type indicators (CARE and billable) in the billing system, with effective dates for each line, lets you track:

? the number of lines under dispute with the LEC. Lines under dispute would have different indicators for CARE and billable line type indicators.

? the date when disputes are finalized or closed. Both indicators would reflect the same value and capture the effective date of the change.

? the average time it takes for a LEC to make a line type change based on a dispute and to forward new customer information back to the IXC, indicating a difference in effective dates.

IXC should conform to data, format requirements

Because PICC disputes involve so many lines, it’s in the IXC’s best interest to conform to data requirements, such as how the data should be formatted and sent. Supplying a template for disputes and corresponding methods and procedures (M&Ps) on how they should be sent, the expected time to resolve, and so on, depend entirely on how the IXC handles disputes internally. Without established M&Ps for PICC disputes, an IXC may be at the mercy of resellers who decide how they want to receive data and how they send it to the IXC.

Resellers and PICC disputes

The PIC charge is usually a straight pass-through charge from the LEC to the IXC and on to the reseller. A trusting soul might believe that the LEC never makes mistakes, thereby failing to audit the PICC bill. Because of the vast number of lines forwarded from the LEC, mistakes are bound to happen, so keep a sharp eye.

The most common mistake? An incorrect line type assigned by the LEC. This occurs when the line is incorrectly coded, or when billing staff fails to properly count secondary lines. These kinds of errors are not always in the LEC’s favor. If a secondary line is incorrectly coded as a primary line, the difference can be $1 or more per line. It also means that the end customer is not being billed enough for the secondary line. It can, of course, go the other way, when the customer is over-billed for a particular line. These invariably return to haunt the IXC in the form of disputes.

Capturing and storing a CARE and billable line type indicator and their respective effective dates lets the IXC extrapolate the data and compare it with the LEC bill on a per-line basis. A database query should accomplish this easily.

Handling customer-owned CICs

When analyzing your PICC billing requirements, remember to consider this: Will you be doing PIC CARE for resellers who own their own customer identification codes (CICs)? In most cases, LECs will bill the CIC owner for PIC charges. If you are planning to offer PIC CARE for those resellers, you will receive the CARE record from the LEC. The LEC, however, in almost all cases will bill the PIC charge directly to the reseller or CIC owner. The CARE record is a vital piece of information that resellers use to accurately audit the LEC bill. How will you get the CARE record to your reseller? One way is to maintain a table of CARE record data received by the LEC. Having this data in a table lets the carrier easily query for records that belong to a particular reseller for a given date range. Such queries can easily be generated into a report or file and sent to the appropriate reseller.

Knowing these functional requirements should lay a firm foundation on which to build your PICC billing system; you will no doubt want to include more functionality to support the way you do business.

Doug Jones is a telecom consultant affiliated with TMNG. He has over 6 years of telecom experience in customer care and billing. He can be reached by e-mail at jdjones@netcom.ca. TMNG’s web site is www.tmng.com.