BSS: Can’t We Prevent the “$18,000 Bill Shocker”?

Connected Planet Susana Schwartz’s story on the man who received an $18K bill for mobile data raises two points: Who’s responsible when a contract lapses, and should operators switch to tiered billing? Here’s a third: Might intelligent back office systems have stopped this mess in the first place?

Schwartz is absolutely correct that consumers have final responsibility for meeting the terms of their telecom service contracts, and that carriers have the right to set rates in accordance with usage.  Ultimately, service providers must move to tiered billing based on each customer’s usage patterns. Given the billions of dollars that operators have invested in bulking up networks, it’s not right to allow a handful of bandwidth hogs to gobble up capacity at flat rates.

But tiered billing isn’t the whole answer to this problem.  Looking back at the $18K bill shocker, and other cases like it, one must ask:

• Did the operator’s billing platform have the capability to establish a hierarchy that identifies and segments consumption patterns per each user?
• Could the system allow the “administrator” — in this case the father of a hyperactive teenage texter and data downloader — to set a threshold on individual usage?
• Was it integrated with front office systems that could notify the administrator when one individual’s usage approaches the threshold, and then suspend service for that user when he or she knowingly passes the limit?

These capabilities and more are readily available in convergent rating and billing platforms integrated with CRM, intelligent self-service and contact centers.  Until service providers embrace modern BSS platforms, or at the very least shoehorn them onto legacy systems to make the latter perform more efficiently, billing shock will continue — and operators will get a PR black eye for a user’s failure to “read the fine print.”  How much happier all parties would be in the long term if the phone company simply called, texted or e-mailed the customer to say, “Hey, time’s up.”

Related posts:

1. Billing Nightmares: “So We’ll Go No More a-Roaming” Susana Schwartz's blog on Bill Shock hits home with any...
2. Telecom PR: When Carriers Compete on BI and Offer Broadband Free Apocalyptic forecasts are still the rage since Nassim Taleb enlightened...
3. BSS: AT&T’s Dive Into Tiered Billing Connected Planet's Kevin Fitchard provides good insights on AT&T's recent...
4. Smart Phones – Smart Enough for M2M? The rise of M2M and, concurrently, today's growing interest in...
5. Telecom PR: T-Mobile to Sprint — “Oh YEAH? I’m More Unlimited!” NEWSFLASH: Sprint launches "All. Together. Now." as first "truly unlimited"...