Many service providers are lagging in their ability to provide near real-time billing, according to a new report from TM Forum.
The report, called “Winning in a Shrinking World: Significance of the Billing Metamorphosis,” shows that those service providers who have invested in efficient and flexible billing systems are already leading the market in terms of success and profitability.
The report offers insights from TM Forum and Stratecast on the impact new converged, multimedia services have on billing systems. It incorporates analysis of data gathered by TM Forum’s Business Benchmarking Program, which includes more than 130 service provider participants from around the world.
The report says subscribers continue to embrace converged and customized services, despite the current economic climate. Delivery of these complex, individualized services requires automated billing processes that operate in near-real-time, as well as billing systems that support converged services through unified billing data.
However, the Forum’s Billing Performance Benchmarking data finds that many service providers lag in their ability to bill for these services. In particular:
- Subscriber billing accounts are updated anywhere from an average of once a day to five times a day; with more than half of study participants updating accounts once a day, one-third less frequently, and the remainder more frequently.
- Leading service providers generate bills twice as fast as lagging service providers. Leading service providers are at or close to a real-time capability, while the average for those lagging is approximately three days.
- There is a strong correlation between bill processing time and cost. Leading service providers have good process maturity and efficient systems that enable them to run frequent billing cycles while keeping costs down.
