US-based Telephony Service Provider acquires customized billing solution at low entry cost from Infozech

The customer

The client is a Telephony Service Provider in California, USA, providing quality international callback, pre-paid calling cards and competitive long distance services. The telco operates through a number of agents spread across the world and is predominantly active in areas where international calls are expensive. The client provides its agents with lots of rights in order to make them independent in their operations. The client follows a prepaid business model, offering its own subscribers a Web site from where they can sign up for different services. The agent too, can sign up through the Web interface.

The client has a switch, which has a TSP software in-built into it. Due to the limited features of the TSP, the client wanted a customized version of Infozech’s billing solution, eBill so that it worked in integration with the TSP.

The requirement

The client has agents present throughout the world. Hence, it wanted to invest a lot of rights in them. The telco needed a solution that would provide agents with the following capabilities:

• The ability to enter a new customer
• Recharge the account of an existing customer
• The ability to enter the recharge amount into the customer’s account
• The ability to view the customer data in order to support the client
• The ability to provide customer care to the subscriber.

What the client required was a backend solution that would enable it to undertake the following:

• Fetch CDRs from the switch
• Make updates on the switch, i.e., to put the recharge information of the subscribers on the switch
• Manage billing through the switch console
  

The challenges

The key challenge was that all these activities of the client were performed manually. Handling such a mode of working made it a complex task. Since the client wanted a mode of payment that would be through a credit card, it required a billing system that was automated. The fact that the customer also wanted to get into a mode of hosted services to take care of its billing needs, also made the task challenging.

The Solution

To satisfy the billing needs of the client, Infozech deployed its eBill billing and customer care solution as a base module along with certain customizations.

• Infozech provided the client with a hosted services model where it remained the application service provider.
• A Web sign up facility was provided for the customer as well as the agent through eBill.
• Since the system was fully automated, manual necessities of provisioning and mediation were eliminated.
• Integration of the payment gateway with the eBill solution was also made in order to facilitate payments made online through credit cards.

The benefits achieved by the customer

The customer was able to achieve the following benefits from the Infozech solution:

• The solution provided the customer with a low entry cost.
• eBill was completely customized to the customer’s needs
• The customer was able to automate its manual processes
• The easy-to-use eBill made system administration simple
• eBill was scalability and grew with the requirements of the customer