When you think about billing, what comes to your mind? Spreadsheets, complicated invoices, customer complaints, and cumbersome and tedious office work.

Billing has long been considered by organizations as a back-office function rather than a strategic growth lever. However, for businesses that have complex pricing models, a high number of subscribers, and pressure to scale quickly, billing can be an untapped opportunity for growth.

In this article, we explore how transforming your billing operations can turn into a competitive advantage for your organization.

Legacy billing systems can hinder your go-to-market speed

When it comes to launching new offers, legacy billing systems can be a major bottleneck. Let us take as an example, a mobile network operator or an MVNO/MVNE. You want to offer a new bundle which combines data with voice and SMS services to a specific customer segment for a defined period only. With a traditional billing system, this would require complex customizations and development time to build new pricing rules and/or integrate your various systems. But, with a flexible customer care and billing engine like XPertBilling®, your marketing team can create packages and bundles on the fly without any coding required. This agility gives your internal teams the freedom to experiment, respond to market demands in real-time, enabling you to go-to-market faster and giving you an edge over your competitors who are still stuck in outdated systems.

Prevent revenue leakage before it impacts your bottom line

Preventing revenue leakage starts with making sure that every transaction, no matter how small, is captured and billed correctly. The leakage is rarely a result of a single record error. Rather, it is a cumulative effect of rounding amounts, missed data feeds, corrupt records, or delayed reconciliation between usage and invoicing. For businesses with sophisticated pricing models like usage-based, hybrid, or tiered, the loss or revenue due to failing to bill customers correctly or completely for the products or services that they have used can quietly have a negative impact on their bottom line. Implementing robust integrations between operational systems and investing in a billing engine that can scale with complexity can be a difference maker. XPertBilling, for example, matches, records, and reconciles each transaction automatically, and accurately rounds payment amounts from four decimals to two. You get up and running quickly without long customization cycles or complex setups.

Deliver more value to your customers through shared data pools

Having the ability to offer shared data pools is a powerful strategy for attracting and retaining large customers. Multiple users, devices, or business units can draw from a single shared data allowance, providing flexibility and perceived value to your clients. While sharing is simple when there is a very small number of users, managing this at scale — when there are thousands of subscribers in the same data pool — can be complex and demands a billing system with robust performance.

Consider, as an example, an IoT provider that wants 1,000 SIM cards for their devices, needs 1TB of data per month, but does not want 1,000 separate data plans. Under the shared pool option, data is shared across these 1,000 devices. The high-usage devices can draw more from the data pool and the low-usage devices less, all without any penalties. Billing in a shared data pool requires an engine with advanced billing and reporting capabilities where instead of assigning individual data allowances to each user or device, you offer data plans that can be shared from a single, collective data pool. Why sell fixed, rigid bundles when you can offer true value to your clients through shared plans?

Revenue Assurance through automatic CDR detection and recollection

Call Detail Records (CDRs) log valuable usage data for billing purposes, including every call, message, or data session initiated by your customers. But, when processed in large volumes, CDRs are prone to errors and may contain missing fields, corrupt data, formatting issues, or incomplete records which can lead to delays in the billing cycle, customer disputes, and operational overhead for your company. Without the right billing system in place, addressing this challenge typically requires a time-consuming, manual intervention to sift through logs and identify the CDRs that contain errors. To make matters worse, many traditional billing systems reject the entire file when errors are detected, causing further delays and inefficiencies.

XPertBilling eliminates these challenges by automatically detecting, isolating, and generating a detailed error log. This automation not only reduces the need for manual intervention but also shortens the processing time and administrative effort while maintaining the integrity of your data. For example, suppose that you collect a file with 1 Million CDRs, and on that file, there is one call from an unknown subscriber.

XPertBilling will automatically isolate that single record and create a detailed log containing the missing subscriber. All one needs to do, even months later, is to identify who this unknown subscriber is, assign it to the correct client, and with just one click the system will include that call in the next billing cycle.

In industries such as telecom where demand can be unpredictable, pricing models intricate, and scalability a moving target, complexity is a constant challenge. As businesses introduce new services and personalize offerings across diverse groups of customer segments, their back-end systems must do more than just keep up. They must enable. Telecom innovation does not end at the network edge. It extends deep into the operational core and continues to billing and invoicing. Customer care and billing platforms are mission-critical systems which serve as foundational pillars on which your core business depends. Organizations should make that last mile count, not just for operational efficiency but also for strategic growth.