Verizon Business Gives Multinational Customers Global Billing View

Building on the launch last month of the Verizon Enterprise Center, Verizon Business released this week a Global Billing Report that provides an aggregate view of telecom expenses to its global and multinational customers.

This advanced but free tool is currently available through the VEC. It supports 62 currencies and can be manipulated by the customer. Several customers in Europe, Asia and the United States currently are using the tool to manage their worldwide billing information.

Verizon Business has been undergoing a billing and OSS transformation for several years. It still has distinct systems for ILEC and legacy billing, international billing, legacy MCI billing systems in the United States, a prime billing system and an integrated billing and reporting system. However, the company utilizes a home-grown common database, or centralized data repository, which feeds the Global Billing Report tool and interacts with other systems in the VEC, including a Telecom Expense Management System called BillManager.

“As a result of meeting with customers, particularly in the billing space, we found that multinational corporations need something that gives them a snapshot of all their spend with Verizon across all its subsidiaries or regions around the world,” said Mark Chodoronek, executive director of global customer enablement and billing assurance at Verizon Business. “And while we are still consolidating as we transform our business, this database allows us to point information from disparate systems in a consistent format to the portal or to specific reports. It helps companies make business decisions.”

Global Billing Report can combine billing data from domestic and international invoices into a group of summary reports that provide a more detailed view of a customer’s services across the regions where the customer operates.

The company plans a series of future enhancements, including expanded product-level reporting and additional languages. The Global Billing report supports three levels of detail and can be viewed either as a download or online: a high-level summary page showing all charges across selected invoices, a second level showing world regions and a third showing reports across all regions.

The company expects to add wireless billing to the report by the end of the year.

Last year, Verizon Business teamed with Computershare and American Forests on a program to plant a tree for every customer who registers to conveniently view and pay bills online. The program is modeled after Verizon’s eTree program for shareholders who opt for electronic versions of annual reports, proxies and other shareholder communications materials. Enterprise customer’ invoices for a single month of call detail can number tens of thousands of pages.

“The carbon footprint and green movement are becoming more a part of everyday life,” Chodoronek said.

Later this year the Verizon Enterprise Center Dashboard application will introduce a Billing Management capability to enable customers to view billing summaries and trends. This will allow users to view wireline and wireless invoice billing trends over a 12-month period as well as obtain a daily snapshot of their wireless unbilled usage.

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