France Telecom: voices and invoices

The Client

France Telecom

France Telecom is one of the world's leading telecommunication carriers, with over 118.6 million customers in 2004, on a pro forma basis, on the five continents (220 countries and territories).

Project Deployment Summary:

There are roughly 100 account managers dealing with 50,000 enterprise customers. In the past, they had been mailing out paper invoices to customers. They were billed based on their service plan and their detailed activity.

It was a nightmare for the account manager to recommend which of the five service plans was best for each customers because of little visibility into their unique usage trends. The customers only received the bill and associated raw activity with no insight as to what this was using an what or how they could utilize their telecommunications services more effectively.

The new application provides a "smart" invoice with both summary and detail information, delivered both on paper and in PDF via e-mail. Their near-term vision is to provide key customers with web-based bill presentment, analysis and approval capabilities.

The Challenges

• To produce 2-4 million pages/month in 48-72 hrs
• To produce picture-perfect analytic content customers wanted both on paper, pdf and excel
• To support their future interactive and actionable content needs that will scale to the 50,000 global customers-100% pure browser, zero training, LDAP-driven security
• To have a common interface for performing customer billing functions, such as addressing billing inquiries, requesting bill reprints, or changing billing preferences. CLICK can present and manage customer billing data from multiple billing systems.
  

Business Benefits, Technical Differentiators

Enable web-based bill presentment and payment (today through third parties)
Customers like getting a consolidated invoice that gives them visibility into their usage in useful formats e.g. by cost center, how much per hour, per app, etc.
Account managers have a good understanding of which service plan to recommend for the customer based on their customer’s actual usage trends
Sales managers have a weapon to retain customers in a highly competitive global telecommunications environment
Application performs well in their 100% unix deployment environment and requires no additional NT based servers.
Track customer billing information and payment history
Query billing information from billing systems in real time
Manage billing adjustments and repayment plans