Vodafone : Power and Speed Billing

Serving 10 million customers since 2002 across all circles for bill presentment through various channels such as print, web, fax, sms and call center.

Company Profile

Vodafone is the world's leading international mobile communications company with operations in 25 countries across 5 continents and 40 partner networks with over 200 million customers worldwide. Vodafone has partnered with the Essar Group as its principal joint venture partner for the Indian market.

Vodafone Essar in India is a subsidiary of Vodafone Group Plc and commenced operations in 1994 when its predecessor Hutchison Telecom (Hutch) acquired the cellular licence for Mumbai. Vodafone Essar now has operations in 16 circles covering 86% of India's mobile customer base, with over 35.6 million customers

SEEinfobiz has been working with Vodafone Essar/Hutch since 2002 and has implemented a cutting edge electronic bill presentment and integration system to deliver innovative customer engagement and marketing solutions.

Scenario and Challenges:

In 2002, Vodafone Essar, then known as Hutch, had an operational billing system which used to deliver bills only in print format. Given the dynamics in the telecom industry, business demanded customized billing for different customer segments that could be delivered via the internet (web) for better customer management.

Hutch was also consolidating their operations in India through mergers and acquisitions of telecom companies in all circles across India in order to have a pan India presence. This mandated consolidation and uniform national format of billing statements across different circles to enhance branding and revenue management.

India is one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world today. With a customer base of over 10 million customers, customer support was getting expensive to run using traditional service touch points like call centers and company stores. An alternate medium using internet self service solutions to handle account statement data, duplicate statement generation and download of billing data for further analysis etc. would save costs and be more convenient.

The billing statement is a great medium to engage the customer. Marketing information can be conveyed to the customer in a timely manner with the billing statement. Vodafone wanted to be able to cross sell/up sell specific programs and services to profiled customers to improve margins and sales.

The acquisition of Hutch by Vodafone in mid-2007 required a complete re-branding of all billing layouts and designs across all circles in less than a month’s time for the launch of Vodafone in India.

Furthermore, with the exponential growth in Vodafone’s Prepaid customer base a system was required for the end users to track their call history and charges.

The Solution

Enterprise wide web centric bill presentment system

SEEinfobiz introduced Hutchison Essar to CLICK - Power and Speed Statements™ (CLICK - PSS), a real-time, web-centric, customer-friendly, enterprise-wide billing and CRM application.

The web-based billing application provides customers with an easy-to-understand and user-friendly bill layout, which can be interpreted by just about anyone. The bill conveys all billing details in a very straightforward manner, such as cost reversals, usage charges, monthly charges, roaming, STD, ISD etc. Moreover, bills can be generated in different languages for different customers.

CLICK– PSS helped Vodafone/Hutch with a uniform bill format delivered to their customers across different locations and circles. This improved centralized customer support and branding across circles.

To implement this solution across the sixteen circles, CLICK - PSS had to connect and consolidate data from various hybrid data sources such as the BSCS billing system, databases and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) files.

To reduce payment Turn Around Time (TAT), the CLICK – PSS system delivers bills in different electronic formats like email, web, fax, sms etc in addition to the printed statement. The systems has a unique bounce tracker module to check for emails read, returned or undelivered to track customer receipt and status.

With CLICK - PSS, Vodafone customer service personnel at their call centers, view the exact same copy of the bill mailed to customers. As both the customer and the customer service personnel are viewing matching data page for page, communication is greatly enhanced and queries can be efficiently resolved in a timely manner.

CLICK – PSS can assist customers to perform advanced bill analysis in order to track usage and calling patterns. A user can slice and dice statement data to analyse usage based on call number, duration, time, amount etc.

Corporate/Enterprise customers can get a consolidated bill for their employee’s call usage for simplified reimbursement and audit purpose. Thus, both business managers and individual employees can better analyze and understand their communication costs and usage, by investigating and identifying trends, segregating their personal/official calls and patterns across multiple views of their billing information.

SEEinfobiz’s CLICK – PSS marketing module has a rule based engine to feature products and service banner advertisements targeted to the individual customer. This enables effective cross/up sell of products and services to the customer on the web as well as the printed bill.

Since August 2007, CLICK – PSS has implemented the bill presentment module for Vodafone’s pre-paid customers through which a bill can be generated on demand and delivered to customers via print media with itemized billing, payment history, balance enquiry, calling plans etc that was available to only post paid customers. This was a tremendous value add to Vodafone pre-paid customers as it provides call details record with the corresponding charges, thus bringing transparency in the prepaid call charges/billing and reducing the load on the customer call center support staff.

Benefits

SEEinfobiz has provided Vodafone with a smart and scalable solution that is able to handle millions of users. With CLICK - PSS, the load on the core billing system is considerably reduced as customers access their billing information online from cached data and not operational data. Moreover, they can perform multiple functions online like payments, statement analysis, printing, downloading in excel/word/pdf, searching and filtering etc. With multiple services being consolidated in a single statement, there has been a substantial reduction in printing and postal costs. Moreover, since the statement is being delivered through different channels like email, web, fax, sms etc this results in reduction of Turn Around Time (TAT) for payments/collections.

With a simple graphical user interface, Vodafone can modify bill statement designs and maintain the application with basic training thereby reducing maintenance and support costs. Furthermore, interactive analysis of all usage data provides insight into customer behavior which can be used to cross/up sell new and existing services to them.

Additional features like simplified uniform billing across circles, advertisements of new products and services to targeted customers, pre-paid users now getting billing statements etc, is all being translated to reduced customer churn and increased loyalty to the Vodafone brand.