Cellular None

Get a pair of cellular executives in a room and you won't get them to stop talking about all the advanced billing features they'll soon be providing.

But before we enter the promised land of next-generation wireless voice and data services, could somebody get these guys to get their existing billing systems to work - in a fashion acceptable to average human beings? With some companies, you get systems that make airport baggage systems look like finely tuned and efficient operations.

What's sad is that most of the cellular services I've looked at actually have the right infrastructure to bill in a competent manner. They just don't seem to know how to use their own systems. Here's what I'd love to see:

Phone numbers on my invoice. This one really gets me. I have three different cellular phones (two in cars and one hand-held). Each phone has its own unique number. And yet, I get a great deal of correspondence from my cellular provider that rarely includes the phone number. Sure, the letters include the account number (a random alphanumeric mix that is about as memorable as the speaking slot in the last hour of the last day at the Networld+Interop show). Why not use the phone number? Is this possible? Sure, because I know it appears on many of the invoices I receive.

Reasonable joint billing. If you do have multiple phones, and ask for a single bill each month, why can't they still break out the charges for each phone to allow you to expense things properly?

Enough with the inconsistent roaming charges. I haven't a clue where my cellular provider has a tower or not, and frankly, I don't care, as long as I can make my call. But what I really dislike is randomly finding out that I am in a "ROAM" zone and am being forced to pay those massive (and unpredictable) charges. Unfortunately, on my bill, I can never tell which charges are for which area.

Deposit your customers' checks on time! This is the worst of all. You send in a check well before the due date, yet your carrier doesn't credit your account until after it. My present cellular provider (according to its customer service department) can take up to five days to credit an account AFTER THE PAYMENT IS RECEIVED. Thus, customers get all these "late" notices even though the company already has the checks in hand. Apparently, (again, according to the customer service department), payments are mailed to a centralized collection point and from there transported back to the main processing office where they are often "very busy" - hence the 4-5 day delay.

To solve this problem, and make it easier for customers to pay, my cellular company recently instituted an electronic credit-card payment scheme. You now have the option of calling in and making a payment (via a tone-response system) bill directly to your credit card. To its credit, the cellular company bills you the same day you make the payment. However, they still (according to the customer service department) have a 3 to 4 day delay that often occurs between the time they register your payment with your credit card company and the time they actually post the payment to the cellular account.

In an informal office survey, we even found one case where a cellular user made a payment on Friday morning by credit card (which was promptly charged to the account) only to have his cellular service disconnected the following Monday afternoon for lack of payment. You guessed it, the payment wasn't credited to their cellular account until Tuesday.

Fortunately, we are not in a monopoly situation yet (although the advertised services in our local area - Washington DC - are so confusing that it is impossible to determine which provider has the "best deal" to offer, rendering them all fairly generic). Users can change their service providers if they so choose.

Unfortunately, most people don't have the luxury of gathering back all of those business cards they just handed out with their cellular numbers on them; once you start using a particular numbers, it's very difficult (from a "what's your number" perspective) to change providers. The last time I checked, cellular systems don't typically offer forwarding to new numbers or "the new number is" messaging (two big features I'd really like to see until cellular number portability arrives sometime next century).

So let's take a step back from the debates on new cellular billing services and instead first try and fix those we already have.