Why billing data is one of service providers’ most overlooked assets

The cost-of-living crisis is presenting new and pressing challenges to service providers. In this blog, Philipp Reischauer explains how good quality, consolidated billing data can help service providers address their challenges and why it’s the foundation of a far more cost-efficient and customer-centric revenue management process.

Despite all the talk about seamless experiences, the current end-to-end revenue management process is highly fragmented from the customers’ perspective. It involves different departments, but these departments report to various executives, have other goals, and are monitored against key performance indicators (KPIs).

Inevitably, this results in an incoherent and suboptimal experience for customers, which presents various challenges to service providers and their customers.  

• Fragmented experiences – result in jarring changes of tone and voice in customer communications, as well as an inability to personalize the approach taken to customers throughout the revenue management process.
• Suboptimal collection of payments – the dunning process (the process of collecting late payments) is frequently disconnected from the reality of the customer relationship and context. This often results in suboptimal, short-term decisions based on only a subset of data.
• Higher costs – the cost of dealing with late-paying customers is far higher than it should be. Too many customers are inappropriately put into dunning, which negatively impacts the customer relationship and fuels churn.
• Delayed payments – confusing bills and unexpected charges lead to disputes, which delay payment and increase the cost of collection and support. Service providers attempt to tackle the results, but rarely address the root cause.

But it needn’t be this way. With customers being more cost-conscious than ever, service providers need to revisit how they manage the end-to-end revenue management process to ensure an optimal outcome for their customers and themselves.

Data is the foundation of a better approach

The key to optimizing end-to-end revenue management processes starts with better data and better access to data. More holistic, accurate data enables service providers to optimize business decision-making, personalize their approach to each customer, and curate a more coherent customer experience.

The problem is that only some service providers have a single, reliable source of billing data. Instead, data is often fragmented across multiple legacy billing systems, and even where a single source of data is available, it’s generally only utilized for one purpose – generating bills.

The challenge for service providers is to bring their billing data into one place and ensure all teams (billing, customer care, and dunning) are working from the same accurate data.

Benefits of a single, reliable source of billing truth

This empowers service providers to take a more personalized, accurate, and appropriate approach to their customers.

When anomalous events are detected – which is far easier to do using AI now that the data is all in one place – service providers can act proactively rather than waiting for customers to become distressed or annoyed and then dealing with the issue.

For example, a high-usage event should trigger the service provider to analyze the context. If the customer was roaming, they could proactively offer a roaming bolt-on package to avoid being stung with high charges. The value of this package should be communicated both at the time and when the bill is issued (to reinforce why the charge is on the bill). This avoids a bill shock event and the inconvenience to the customer of having to call the contact center to resolve the issue. It also lowers support costs and reduces the likelihood of both a dispute and late payment.

By highlighting the explanation for an unexpected charge on the bill, any customer that still needs to call the contact center can be dealt with more efficiently because both the call center agent and the customer know what the issue is and what the options are for resolving the problem.

By combining a single data source, proactive customer notifications, and digital billing, service providers can close the gaps between departments and the ‘insight gap’ – delivering the data needed by customer care and dunning teams to make better decisions. Such an approach also makes self-service smarter and boosts digitalization, further lowering costs.

For many service providers bringing all their data together to create a single, reliable source of ‘billing truth’ looks like it will require a multi-year digital transformation and system consolidation. While that may be desirable in the long term, they can accelerate the time to benefits by taking a pragmatic approach and joining their billing silos today using the Calvi Platform.

Once they have all their billing data in one place, they can immediately deliver a  wide range of benefits to themselves and their customers. The revenue management process can be reintegrated into a coherent whole with all departments and staff working together and smarter to achieve optimal customer and service provider results.

Find out how Calvi can easily and cost-effectively bring your billing data together to empower a more effective end-to-end revenue management process.