Better service though better billing

Verizon Business is tansforming its billing processes to help make it easier for its customers to understand the complex world of telecom billing

When the Verizon/MCI merger closed in January 2006, Verizon Business was born. This “new” company faced an old problem: integrating billing systems. In addition to the proliferation of systems dating back to WorldCom's acquisition spree, Verizon Business wanted to make sure it went forward with the best of what both Verizon and MCI had been offering, said Dave Landry, executive director of billing systems for Verizon Business.

This transformation has succeeded to the extent that it now includes Verizon International, producing bills in multiple languages and currencies, and soon will be expanded to encompass Verizon Wireless.

“We want to offer a bill view of all the various global billing systems, and that process will be completed this year,” Landry said. “It is being phased in starting with the biggest ones. This is one of those mission-accomplished-type moments. Billing systems are being shut down — several every quarter through the end of the year. We are down to four major billing systems: long-distance voice and data, wholesale, rebilling of [local exchange] services, and the ultra high-end customer bill.”

The integration of Verizon Wireless bills for Verizon Business customers is in pilot mode right now, Landry said. “The Verizon Business Customers Center will be renamed Verizon Enterprise Customer Center, and wireless and wireline reports will be available,” he said.

The process to transform Verizon Business's billing system was put into place a month before the merger, and it has been at work ever since. “Our approach to billing transformation had five components,” Landry said. “First was systems consolidation — we started with 34 systems and plan to get down to four. Once we get to four, we can talk about two, and once we get to two, we can talk about one. But one is not a goal, and I don't expect to get there.”

The second component, and the one most visible to customers, was electronic billing, and the third was creating a “combined billing portal; a common [electronic data interchange, or EDI,] format; and a common billing analysis/application that can be implemented on a customer's desktop on their LAN,” Landry said. “That application provides capabilities that go beyond what we have on the billing portal. It's called Bill Manager 4.0.”

A fourth component, called Contract Rate Implementation Transformation, streamlined the process by which Verizon implemented the rates into its billing system. “Then we had a financial transformation component that was truly back office,” Landry said.

MCI and Verizon each had EDI, but with different implementations of the EDI 811 standard, he said. “We recognized that we could retrofit the MCI data to the Verizon format but not vice versa,” he added. “So we created a common format based on Verizon, but we also grandfathered in the MCI standard because we recognized that some customers might not want to do the reprogramming it would take to convert to the Verizon system.”

In terms of bill analysis, Verizon Business tried to take the best of both worlds from Verizon's Bill Manager 3.0 and MCI's Perspective Plus.

“Verizon had a good user interface; it was easier to use than MCI's Perspective Plus, but Perspective Plus was better from a technical perspective — it was more scalable, could handle more data, and could be single-user or multi-user,” Landry said. “So we decided to stay with the easy-to-use look and feel and analysis of Bill Manager, and add analytics from Perspective Plus but make it Sequel-server based.”

Landry said that process was “a lot of work, but frankly not a case study of the most difficult IT problem ever solved.”

To allow Perspective Plus customers to get used to the new system, Verizon Business ran them in parallel for six months. “We are just about at the finish line on that one,” Landry said.

The last piece of that component was the user portal, he said. “We really had two totally different philosophies of how we deployed our portals,” Landry said. “MCI had a portal, and each billing system produced a bunch of reports that could go back into the portal. Verizon had Verizon Account Manager, and it received a standard output called VZ-450, which we used to produce Billing Manager and EDI, plus it had dynamic analytics and bill views so all the billing systems formats — fed into VZ-AM — could generate lots of different reports.”

That flexibility enabled customers to track bills over ranges of months, by individual users or departments, or in other ways, Landry said. So the decision was made to enable former MCI billing systems to produce the VZ-450 standard outputs.

“We got 80% of the revenue up in VZ-450 by the end of January 2006, when the merger took place,” Landry said. “What became difficult was when we started to use that data for other purposes — when we went into a much lower granularity of data. It took an extra year to be able to use that data for financial transformation. We were tracking things like revenue codes at a product level, and we had never tried to do that. It was a good fit, but we had to go back to the billing systems and make them include additional information.”

Billing can be a differentiator in the enterprise if done well, Landry said. This has become more true now that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requires businesses to be able to track, analyze and audit their telecom expenses.

“The job is providing the right tools to our customers so their cost of auditing becomes lower,” Landry said. “It becomes an irritant to customers if we don't do it well and a source of cost. Electronic billing is a means of lowering the cost of auditing. The philosophy we have is one size does not fit all. As a marketer, we are marketing to three different audiences.”

Landry said that the first group of customers is highly sophisticated. They have their own IT systems and want data. “For those, we have EDI or VZ-450 data directly into their systems. There is a lot more granularity and specificity to the data than there is in the EDI standard,” he said. The middle group of customers uses Verizon's Bill Manager to do custom queries based on their data, and lower-level customers use the Verizon portal.

“Telco bills, everybody knows, are infamous for lacking accuracy and understandability” Landry said. “We are trying to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, with 90 reports from Bill Manager and 60 from the portal.”

Finally, Verizon Business is providing visibility for claims and adjustments, so that customers can actually see that they are being properly billed and being given billing credits where they are due, Landry said, even if there are multiple credits being made across many different bills.