What Drag and Drop Means to Hierarchical Billing: Is Self-Care on the Horizon?

Drag and drop technology offers the ability to pictorially view an account hierarchy, much in the manner that file structures appear in Microsoft Explorer, as well to make changes by dragging elements within the account to another location. Even though billing vendors have employed this capability for some time to support their business customers, it now stands to open new avenues for providers who are trying to cut costs and streamline their operations, and it could pave the right path of self-care for high-value business customers.

Why Drag and Drop?

Businesses simulate tedious hierarchical webs that in many cases are constantly changing and evolving: A division may be dissolved or a company may merge with another corporate entity, an employee may be moved to report to another department, or any number of changes might occur that need to be altered within the systems to reflect how an invoice is delivered and who is billed for charges.

“It’s critical that these [changes] be tasks that you don’t have to write code for—because every time I have to come in and create new hierarchies and new billing relationships and new data formats, if I’ve got to bring in the systems integrator or the vendor to make that change, then it’s not cost-effective,” says Jim Culbert, vice president of technology at MetraTech.

Therefore, providers have an inherent need for user-friendly functionality that enables them to view and validate changes to any relationship in an account hierarchy with an easy-to-understand interface.

When a customer service representative is on a call, changing hierarchies must be quick and dummy-proof for the CSR to get through these transactions and processing to set up relationships correctly, says Darla Thompson, executive director of broadband and customer relationship management at CSG Systems. “With drag and drop, you know exactly which attributes that you’re grabbing; and when you make that association again, it’s very easy to see how you make that association,” she says. “In previous systems, the ability to create those hierarchies was very cumbersome and very time-consuming.”

“We’ve had examples where the hierarchies for the business accounts themselves that have been set up will involve more than 5,700 invoice pages,” she says. “You can imagine what that hierarchy looks like.”

Complex Underpinnings

While drag and drop may appear simple, a lot goes on behind the scenes to make hierarchy changes.

“You’re [really] setting up a relationship for the billing as well as setting up the reporting structure,” Thompson explains. “Behind the scenes, we have set up the business rules so that it actually associates specific products and services and their associated rates. As we drag and drop that information—maybe a specific product and service, for instance—it is then associating that to that account number or account ID, so that the billing engine then knows who to direct the charge to.”

Many systems allow changes to rates, plans, hierarchies and data formats well before they happen and assigning effective dates for them. When that date rolls around, those changes take effect. “That’s one of the behind-the-scenes things that is tremendously difficult to address,” MetraTech’s Culbert says. This is because a change may be implemented that may affect usage that applies before or after the change, so a modification to the hierarchy cannot just be based on today’s date. For example, if a change is made today but affects usage a month ago, and the biller creates new invoices against the changed hierarchy or the changed rate structure, there may still be transactions from previous dates that applied to the hierarchy’s previous rates.

Convergys’ product includes two major classifications of accounts. First is a root, enterprise or liable account, in which the account holder is responsible for the payment for the whole account and is charged for any delinquent payments in the hierarchy. The other type is a reporting account, which is a non-liable account for which statements can be issued detailing usage, but for which the nominal holder is not liable for charges. Convergys supports an audit trail for any hierarchy changes made.

Amdocs has positioned its hierarchy structure in alliance with its acquisition of Clarify’s CRM product. The idea is that in terms of the interface, the customer could change hierarchies in either the billing or CRM interface. It would be updated in real time; any changes a CSR might make would be immediate and a customer could see the changes in real time.

Self-Care

Simplifying the management of account hierarchies has providers and their customers thinking. Tops on their list of thoughts is self-care.

“When we talk about self-care, we’re talking about extending almost all if not all of the capabilities a CSR would have to be an administrator right in the end user, right in the service provider’s customer,” explains Michael Couture, vice president of product marketing at Amdocs. “Instead of having to call in to a call center to do that work, they can go online and do that work themselves through corporate self-care.”

Not only could self-care offload some of the providers’ burden of managing complex hierarchies for their clients, but it could save them the cost of handling these changes. “Corporate customers are significant in terms of cost,” Couture explains. “These changes are happening in a large company all the time—they are always adding lines, always changing calling codes for particular employees, calling cards and everything else.”

Jed Durso, product manager at MetraTech, points out that typically service providers will have one account administrator who will handle two or three large enterprise customers. With self-care, account administrators could probably double or triple the number of enterprise customers that they can manage.

Self-care “has to happen. The cost of operations of the carriers and service providers is just out of control, and in order to take this and scale it these guys have got to trim down to survive,” Culbert says. “They can no longer take these wildly expensive call center calls. … They are starting to get squeezed all over, and they’ve got to look for better operational efficiency, especially if they are going to extend out and expand the numbers of services they offer.”

While Culbert estimates that providers could save into the double digits on call center costs, most of MetraTech’s provider customers are still using this capability only internally with their CSRs. Initial forays into self-care are about the ability of enterprise customers not only to make changes, but also simply to log onto the Web site and review the hierarchy. “A lot of our customers have said that just giving them the ability to eyeball it has produced a costs savings for them,” he says.

Implementation Issues

While self-care is a great concept with many benefits, providers must address several issues in implementing it. Security is one concern. Allowing self-configuration can be risky, so providers must have the necessary security in place so that only certain users can have access to make those changes.

According to Jane Braymon, lead product manager at Convergys, her company has had requests from some carriers to open up the functionality to enable them to do self-management of their account. “We’re in the process of further defining those requirements with regard to some of the security issues and reporting and visual representation that they want to look at, and how we can enable some of these drag and drop capabilities out in a self-care environment,” she says.

Some of the issues involve the response time on the volume of information, what information exactly should be made available in self-care, what information the business customer really wants to know and in how much detail, and whether to provide the information in real time or batch mode. In addition, business rules must be put into place so that a user cannot inadvertently change the relationships in an account.

Business rules might include delineating the account type and the relationship of services to a customer, as well as whether a service can be broken out to a specific account type.

Regarding business policy, Amdocs’ Couture says that from a system perspective a provider must be able to configure business logic so that if it needs to prorate services, it can. “You really need to think about how you’re going to do this as a service provider, because there may be some implications that you may need to manage and understand what the impact is going to be to the ultimate end user using the services,” he says.

MetraTech’s Culbert says providers would be wise to create templates for building customers’ account hierarchies. “If you’re doing massive changes to whole groups of individuals, the ability to take and build new plans or new profiles based on templates is extremely important, because these changes can affect hundreds if not thousands of billing relationships, and for each one of those you don’t want to have to go in and slam in new parameters,” he says. “Being able to templatize common operations and being able to do those as a one shot, as opposed to having to do multiple [operations], is extremely important.”

Consumer Hierarchies?

Vendors and providers alike are just starting to think about supporting consumer hierarchies. While hierarchies exist today in some residential accounts, such as multi-dwelling units, many wireless offerings could lend themselves to hierarchies in family accounts.

For example, having a hybrid of postpaid and prepaid accounts in a single hierarchy is of interest, particularly for a family. Such plans will have different buckets of usage and will require different rules about how to charge different services. A mother and father might have their voice services on a postpaid basis, and the kids might draw from one prepaid balance. All of the usage for volume discounts could still be applied for the family, but the kids would have a usage limit. In a hybrid environment, the discounts that the parents might get could be applied back to the kids’ prepaid bills so they could do more prepaid gaming or use it for their voice services. When they replenish, the mother and father can authorize the kids to replenish their bill, or they can go ahead and use the credit card.

“I think in the wireless sector there is a lot of traction and interest about creating bundles of services within families in order to generate wireless usage,” says Rick Findlay, director of wireless industry solutions at Convergys. While this concept could come to fruition, there is not a high level of demand yet.

In addition, hierarchies come into play for split billing. For example, in a residential situation two roommates may want charges listed out separately. Businesses especially are asking for more robust split billing capabilities, according to Convergys’ Braymon.

Customers are becoming a little more sophisticated and now ask to use accounting codes—a four-digit code to delineate who should receive the charges—to manage their calls. While this is not yet implemented, customer requests are moving Convergys to consider adding accounting codes in the future.

Amdocs’ Couture notes that most interest in this type of split billing has been in the wireless arena.

Be it for self-care, enabling consumer hierarchies or allowing split billing in business account hierarchies, momentum is considerable for improvements in dealing with the complex nature of account intricacies. Providers are constantly seeking ways to improve their capabilities to manipulate hierarchies, and soon their customers may well be in charge of this task, allowing providers to realize greater cost savings and improve customer satisfaction—two top priorities.