What is a Bill?

In essence a bill is a notification of monies owed. However, if you dig a little deeper, you will see that your billing system is a key element to the success of your business. Managed well billing can become a real asset for your business, enabling you to provide flexible services, innovative pricing and excellent customer care. Managed poorly, however and it will restrict your expansion, increase your operating costs, force you to be less flexible than you’d like and could even damage your cashflow, as well we your hard earned reputation.

Thrive in a Changing Market

As far as the communications market is concerned Aurora Kendrick James (AKJ) sees that the traditional telecoms market is rapidly becoming saturated. With so many active resellers (we estimate in excess of 1,200) and such low barriers to entry, the margins available to CP’s are being quickly eroded. The successful businesses recognise that to survive they will need to ensure that their operations are streamlined and efficient and that their customer service is excellent. Importantly they will also need to develop new supplier relationships and deliver new and innovative services to their customers to ensure that their businesses revenues do not decline.

To AKJ, convergence provides a great opportunity for those businesses with the ability to really understand their customer's businesses and needs to create bespoke services and solutions that will radically change the effectiveness and profitability of their customers through improved communications. AKJ believes that Billing, Management Information and Customer Care are at the heart of delivering these services, and the business is constantly evolving its services to ensure that our customers can maximise their margins and bring new quality services to market as quickly as possible.

Over the next two years the telecommunications market will undergo some significant changes including the introduction of BT’s 21CN, the phasing in of WLR3 and the take up of VoIP services, to name just a few that we need to address today. The boundaries between telecoms and IT have already merged, and shortly customers ranging from home users to the largest corporate organisations will be demanding solutions that integrate fixed line, mobile, voice and data. To provide these services, CP’s must be able to provide converged billing and have the management systems to ensure that they can support their customers. At AKJ we recognise that these changes will be the make or break of many CP’s, and we will continue to invest in developing our systems to provide the end to end services that our customers will require to be the market leaders in next generation telecoms services.

A Complete Billing Solution = Better Communications

The key to success is a successful billing platform which can support voice, mobile, data and converged communications to provide a single bill. At AKJ, their systems not only provide a unified “Onebill Service”, they go further by integrating with their customers to support billing, customer care, order provisioning, sales ledger, management reporting and web/e-mail delivery.

A successful billing solution can reap an array of benefits for your organisation: -

The automation significantly reduces the need to re-key information into multiple systems and negates the need for your staff to spend long periods of time processing through carrier provisioning screens. This results in significant improvements in staff productivity and reduced billing errors for customers which in turn will reduce the number of customer complaints and improve customer satisfaction.

Understand your customers and their usage by running and interpreting reports to identify trends and profiles to be able to make more informed decisions. By profiling customers, you are in a better position to be able to send out targeted and customised messages to enhance response rates.

Gain a competitive edge by enhancing your flexibility in tailoring your services to meet customer’s needs. Find out what information and format your customers want to see on their bill and then customise them accordingly. A satisfied customer is likely to remain loyal and promote your services to others.

Integrated system elements will save you valuable time, resource and money which can help drive your business forward.

Electronic Billing

As organisations become more accustomed to working online, you can increasingly benefit from providing online billing to your customers. An online bill can significantly reduce costs such as postage, printing and fulfilment. Not only that, there are the ‘green’ benefits due to significant reduction in paper being used. Online functions can also offer additional benefits such as the function to track balances, make payments and view itemised calls and history at the click of a mouse.

Applying Experience and Technical Know-How

By working with AKJ, you’ll not only be able to access the latest billing technologies and services, but more importantly you’ll gain a partner with over 10 years experience in proactively helping its customers to become market leaders - experience that they will apply to your business.

We pride ourselves on our close working relationship with our customers, and we measure the success of our business by the success of our customers. We are committed to not only identifying new ways to streamline and improve the billing process, but also to identify opportunities for our customers to effectively scale their businesses and improve their revenues and margins from their customer base.

Billing Data Can Be Used For So Much More…

AKJ has created a tailored pre-sales support service which we are offering to customers to help as an aid to achieving new business sales. We carry out a detailed and accurate analysis of fixed and mobile prospects based on current telecoms usage and create a detailed review and reports. Some of the issues reviewed include;

Dial up data and router issues

Call misuse and abuse (Premium, DQ, Intl, Long Duration)

Inter site traffic reporting

Inventory review – identifying wasted resources and legacy services

Mobile reporting

This pre-sales analysis has helped customers improve their customer bids by focussing on solutions to key issues rather than simply discussing a price.
Copyright 2010

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