Verizon finds MCI had a habit of creating a new billing system for every new service.
Last year’s multibillion-dollar combinations of Verizon-MCI and AT&T-SBC resulted not only in the two biggest U.S. carriers but also in two monster billing-integration projects.
Last year’s multibillion-dollar combinations of Verizon-MCI and AT&T-SBC resulted not only in the two biggest U.S. carriers but also in two monster billing-integration projects.
Neither megacarrier has made much headway in consolidating its billing systems, but they do have plans underway and are taking interim steps designed to boost customer service. Verizon at this point is much more forthcoming than AT&T about its efforts.
Customers are eagerly awaiting the integrated systems, which should result in more accurate and easier-to-understand bills. For now though, customers say they are just happy the mergers haven’t messed up their bills.
“Right now billing systems are very siloed,” says Burt Sky, director of carrier strategies and operations at Gartner. Consolidating them should benefit customers and the carriers themselves, which would be able to cut costs and speed service rollouts, he says.
Verizon is in the early stages of a two-and-a-half year plan to streamline 30 billing systems into four platforms, says Dave Landry, executive director of billing systems at Verizon Business Information Systems.
The challenge is great in part because billing systems mushroomed at MCI in the years before the merger as a result of the company’s many acquisitions and its habit of creating a billing system for every new service deployed, Landry says.
Verizon eliminated one voice billing system soon after the companies merged and plans to consolidate dedicated data service billing platforms in the first quarter of 2007. “We are dealing with the largest of the billing systems upfront,” Landry says. “There are some we won’t convert. The products will atrophy and the systems will rust away over time.”
Landry will not say which systems will rust away, not wanting to confuse customers. The four core billing systems are wholesale, a “boutique biller for ultra high-end customers,” a local exchange carrier biller and a data biller that will cover everything else, he says.
But before Verizon gets down to four systems, it is making changes that should improve billing incrementally. These include standardizing on one data format for collecting bill information, integrating legacy MCI and Verizon customer portals, and implementing a new contract rate review platform that promises to improve accuracy.
Verizon is standardizing on a common data format that lets it perform electronic billing across all systems, Landry says. VZ450, a format used within Verizon premerger, feeds Verizon Business’ portal, bill analysis tool and electronic data interchange (EDI) outputs, and will be accessible to customers via programs such as telecom expense management (TEM) software, he says.
Customer Liz Friedman is encouraged.
“I get Verizon bills from all of the separate regional entities,” says Friedman, a network-provisioning manager at NYCE Payment Networks, a Metavante company in Secaucus, N.J. “Verizon New Jersey, Verizon New England. It would be nice to get one bill for all local service, she says.
“I use TEM software, so if I could get the carriers to electronically bill it would be beautiful. Even providing data on a CD that could be uploaded would be helpful,” Friedman says. “We are going to be pounding on their door harder and harder to get that done.”
Verizon says that by November customers will be able to access the new information at the company’s portal for the majority of its business services. Also by then, Verizon will be doing away with the old MCI customer portal, Landry says, adding that customers can get a better understanding of their total spend when accessing data from a single view.
Verizon also is developing a National Summary Statement. This will be a total cost report that is more geared toward general business management than telecom expense managers, Landry says.
The carrier also is attempting to simplify how it processes new and revised contract rates with its billing system.
“We will see the benefit . . . toward the end of next year,” Landry says. The carrier goes through 110 processes when doing contract rate review for an invoice. That number will go down, he says. “It will be more about building quality in rather than repeated inspections.”
AT&T’s plan
AT&T is keeping details of its plans quieter. The company declined to be interviewed for this story, providing this prepared statement: “Our merger integration is on track and ahead of schedule. And, enterprise customer billing integration is no different than any other aspect of the merger integration in that respect,” said Ihor Zyga, vice president of billing solutions for AT&T.
“By the end of [the fourth quarter of 2006] we will begin delivering IT capabilities for service delivery, assurance and billing to migrate and/or integrate existing legacy-SBC customers with AT&T enterprise platforms. And, we will increase capacity of major enterprise ordering and contracting systems to support legacy-SBC user volumes,” Zyga says. “These two activities will provide the greatest impact to our enterprise customers from a billing standpoint.”
The carrier is telling users that the SBC electronic billing platform is being phased out and all e-billing is being moved to legacy AT&T systems. It shared this and other billing integration plans at a user group meeting for TEM vendor Rivermine in mid-September, says Larry Van Etten, a senior manager at IKON Office Solutions’ telecom service center in Buffalo.
“It’s nice knowing they have a plan,” he says.
Van Etten says he was originally under the impression that SBC’s electronic billing platform had won out. “We were blown away,” he says. “The issue for us is we were not an AT&T customer. They’re now getting us back by default.”
AT&T’s plans raise questions for others.
“SBC has been trying forever to get an e-billing system and I have not been able to accomplish that with them,” NYCE’s Friedman says. “It would be great to have electronic billing from all of AT&T, but I’m hearing from AT&T they don’t see this coming for years.”
Since the merger, the carrier has changed the company name on invoices and NYCE has seen improvements in circuit implementations and customer service on billing issues, Friedman says. But “as far as e-billing and getting access to all services on AT&T business direct [the carrier’s customer portal] or with an EDI view in any combined way, that’s not happening,” she says.
SBC’s track record for providing visibility into its billing and other operations hasn’t been strong, says Rick Valencia, founder and chairman at ProfitLine, a company that offers telecom procurement to payment services for large enterprise companies.
“No one will believe SBC is working on a converged billing platform,” he says. “We’re waiting in anticipation to see what it will be.”
Van Etten has asked to be part of AT&T’s beta program to have legacy SBC customers migrate over to the AT&T platform. IKON will have to build a new bill reader so the AT&T e-bills can be directly fed into IKON’s TEM system from Rivermine. Post-user meeting, IKON got in touch with its AT&T sales representatives to discuss the beta program and learned that word of the billing consolidation plan hadn’t trickled down to all of them yet, Van Etten says.
The office supplies company, also a Verizon customer, has been working closely with that carrier as well in testing out its e-billing system. “We’re taking one test bill per month,” he says. “There’s still work ahead, but we know we’re making progress.”
