FEATURES AND BENEFITS

Features and Benefits

Real-time Billing

Flexible Rating

Multiple Business Models

In today’s world of IP communication, service providers must do business with multiple resellers, agents, and other service providers. These collaborations result in a wide variety of business models, creating a need for advanced revenue-sharing schemes. Billing supports origination and termination partner agreements, ensuring revenue for service providers via sophisticated partner management and settlement mechanisms.

With CallingPlaces' PortaBilling, providers have the flexibility to define their own business models, as well as offer a billing and customer care solution for multiple Virtual Service Providers (VSPs) within a single billing system.

Prepaid and Postpaid Service

CallingPlaces' PortaBilling supports all customer types:

CallingPlaces' PortaBilling makes it easy to offer prepaid calling card services. Service providers can easily create calling-card batches by using our Card Generation tool. For prepaid calling cards, CallingPlaces' PortaBilling provides full debit services, including disposable and rechargeable cards. CallingPlaces' PortaBilling provides a real-time payment database for tracking and viewing payments entered into the system. This allows prepaid customers to start using the service immediately after paying for it

Prepaid customers receive service precisely for the prepaid amount; the system keeps track of the customer account balance, deducting from it according to service usage. When the balance bottoms out, service is disabled and the customer must then recharge the account. Credit and limited-credit customers are invoiced periodically, with each invoice reflecting all charges since the last invoice. Credit customers have no limit on their service charges, while limited credit customers are restricted to a predefined credit amount. During service use the customer balance is checked, and once the customer account reaches the credit limit, the account is disabled in real time.

Products and Account Management

CallingPlaces' PortaBilling provides the flexibility needed to define tariffs for new products, enabling deployment of market-driven services instantly. CallingPlaces' PortaBilling’s open and flexible service environment and its straightforward interface allow services to be added, modified or enhanced on the spot, with no service disruption or additional development necessary. Alternative solutions simply cannot compete in terms of the flexibility provided by CallingPlaces' PortaBilling.

Using CallingPlaces' PortaBilling, service providers can quickly bring new products and promotional packages to market, as well as smoothly modify existing ones. CallingPlaces' PortaBilling also offers the ability to bundle services effortlessly, with the ability to flexibly define mandatory and optional services within service bundles.

Web-Based Customer Care and Self-Provisioning

CallingPlaces' PortaBilling provides Web-based tools to analyze and respond to customer behavior and activity in real time. Web interfaces providing up-to-the-minute account information are available for both subscribers and customer service representatives. Customer self-care reduces operational costs, while giving subscribers the personalized online service they demand - at any time and from anywhere.

Service providers with remote operation centers can provide full customer service capabilities locally with CallingPlaces' PortaBilling Web applications. Customer service representatives can create, search for and modify accounts, and view customer activity and balances. The resulting service quality builds customer loyalty and increases traffic volume.

Virtual Private Networks for Corporate Accounts

CallingPlaces' PortaBilling offers a flexible approach to account hierarchy rating and billing to accommodate complex organizational and business models. CallingPlaces' PortaBilling supports unlimited levels of accounts within a business hierarchy, and allows service providers to offer special flexible deals to enterprise customers. For example, service providers can assign different products and tariffs to different accounts, even within the same organization. Given that a mobile sales force has very different telephony needs than an accounting department, these features are a major selling point with large corporate accounts.

Today, VPN represents an essential service for enterprise customers, and opens a new market for service providers. This value-added service is highly appealing to large enterprises in that it enables them to control and reduce the total telecom costs of intra-enterprise calls. Voice VPN support ensures that calls within the enterprise’s VPN have a higher level of quality and are rated differently. CallingPlaces' PortaBilling enables providers to distinguish between enterprise subscribers’ on-net to on-net, on-net to off-net, off-net to on-net, and off-net to off-net calls. The VoIP VPN service also allows special treatment for extension numbers, which is a common practice within enterprises.

Reports and Invoices

CallingPlaces' PortaBilling generates a variety of reports highlighting vital information needed by providers, in a format that is easily imported into any database or invoicing system.

With CallingPlaces' PortaBilling, service providers pre-define the billing cycles (weekly, monthly, etc.) for each billable account and automate the process of generating reports. The system offers built-in CDR reports on account usage. And, of course, the PortaOne service team can build a customized reporting system for the service provider on request.

Partnerships

CallingPlaces' PortaBilling was designed for fast, straightforward integration with leading equipment vendors’ hardware. CallingPlaces' PortaBilling is ready to install and integrate with network elements (gateways and gatekeepers) from major vendors like Cisco and Quintum. CallingPlaces' PortaBilling also supports multiple vendor systems, providing customers with the flexibility to scale up their systems to meet rising traffic volumes. Also, the system’s open architecture is designed to interface with external applications such as legacy, CRM and ERP systems.

Scalability, Reliability and High Availability

The CallingPlaces' PortaOne billing and customer care solution gives service providers the ability to expand their service offerings and subscriber base, without the need to redesign or replace their existing billing and customer care software. CallingPlaces' PortaBilling has been designed to adapt seamlessly to the evolution of network infrastructure. With CallingPlaces' PortaBilling, service providers can work with multiple equipment vendors and add more servers with no downtime.

This carrier-grade solution has proven itself time and again, supporting millions of subscribers and countless simultaneous transactions and reacting instantly while customers are online. In order to accommodate millions of customer accounts, CallingPlaces' PortaOne offers a multi-server solution that separates the billing system from the accounts database. This architecture can handle hundreds of events per second, such as customer authentication and cost calculations. CallingPlaces' PortaBilling uses the MySQL database server, the world’s most widely-used open-source database.

Operation Support Systems

CallingPlaces' PortaBilling is a comprehensive solution that includes call management and traffic analysis support systems for load monitoring and analyzing customer behavior, thereby maximizing utilization of network resources.

Closely linked to this is CallingPlaces' PortaBilling’s fraud detection component, which activates various alarms whenever user-defined parameters are violated. This feature ensures that service providers will not lose revenue due to fraudulent use of their network. Furthermore, it allows users to build fraud inquiries based on a defined set of parameters. When the specific parameters defined by the operator are violated, the fraud detector alerts the operator. Unusual changes in call volume which may reflect a network malfunction are also monitored by the CallingPlaces' PortaBilling software.

Fraud alerts go off when CallingPlaces' PortaBilling detects:

Statistics and Monitoring

The CallingPlaces' PortaBilling Statistics Module is an effective, analytical marketing tool. This module produces sophisticated reports and graphic analyses of call activity. A clear indication of customer usage behavior is supplied by data indicating peak hours, top customers and excessive telephone use. Data on average call duration and the number of abandoned calls provide a means of measuring quality of service, while market segment penetration is reflected in information on top destinations and customer groups. A “Compare Tariff” report allows providers to compare their rates to those of competitors, suppliers or standard PSTN services. A call volume analysis can also be made, based on information indicating the total number of calls per gateway and line.

Monitoring reports are essential to providers and enterprises as a basis for deciding on the optimum allocation of resources and efficient revenue-saving measures. The CallingPlaces' PortaBilling monitoring module (RRD Based) generates reports showing call loads to different destinations, call volumes at different hours of the day, and numbers of calls per minute for a specific gateway or group of gateways, as well as providing a means of evaluating maximum network capacity. Traffic data is summarized in peak, average and daily traffic reports, which may be displayed and printed in various graphic formats.

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