Convergent Billing
Unity Billing provides a single platform that manages and handles any type of billing end to end for a satellite operator. Collecting traffic data in real time, mediating into internal event based format, rating of traffic data across multiple levels, interact directly with operators financial platforms, handle tax requirements and ensure that all rated services can be offered on a single invoice if wanted.
Our Billing functionality provides centralised billing, provisioning, monitoring and customer care that streamlines processes for cost-efficient customer service, lower operating costs and improved profits. It is designed for satellite organisations that face complex bill cycles and fragmented invoice challenges. It has helped enterprises with their global statementing challenges entailing multiple currencies and multiple satellite network providers in streamlining their operation..
Let Unity Billing operate your real time billing needs acros services from Inmarsat I4, Inmarsat GX, Iridium Openport, Iridium NEXT, Thuraya, Eutelsat or directly services from AST, Satcom Direct, Stratos or similar.
What is Convergent Billing
If you as a satellite operator is providing different services Inmarsat I4, Iridium, Thuraya, Globalstar, KVH VSAT or any own developed services across broadband, pre-paid and post-paid, then can Unity Convergent billing platform gather all into a single Traffic view with invoices and reports across the offered services – meaning a customer get a single self-care environment, a single invoice and basically a single view across his account.
Convergent billing is the integration of all service charges onto a single customer invoice and a unified view of the customer. Customer should should get complete account information for all the services opted. Customer receives a single bill and makes a single payment for all the services – without being exposed to third party branding.
Unity is a truly Convergent Billing System that consolidates any number and combination of products and services onto a single bill, regardless of the type of product and market segment, i.e., prepay, postpay, group services.
Another important parameter contributing in our convergent billing is a single product and price catalogues for pre-paid as well as post-paid customers.
Improves customer billing experience
Our real time billing operation allow real time monitoring across spending, usage and credit risk for the operator as well as for all the customers. It facilitates the ability to react fast on a given traffic situation and minimize the risk of having terminals running a lot of traffic causing issues with the customers and the payments.
Facilitate a single billing struucture, traffic view and invoicing across many different satellite services - offer customers to get online access to the processed data and allow customers to monitor and extract own billing related data directly.
Integrated billing and traffic notifications keep the partners and end users up to data with the situation allowing then to interact when needed - as soon as an invoice is approved will it be made available in the online self care for the customer that in the same interface can export details linked to the generated invoice.
Offer larger partners to directly connect their own platforms to Unity API that allow then access in real time to any of the underlaying satellite networks or internal functionalities - or simply allow then to perform self care across permitted services - for special project will it even be possible to create dedicated partner or project frontend interfaces that have the shape and look wanted for the project.
Account Receiable (Cost)
Our rating will always calculate the cost for the different services based on the cost price and conditions added to a given product - this is allowing the operator to keep a good eye on received supplier invoices and the calculated cost to see if their is major differences.
Traffic feed for partners
Unity are able to process any traffic data in real time - this will allow partners and customers to follow their real time usage across usage and spending - allow direct overview over group packages and associated allowance.
The platform can generated automatic traffic files for a partner daily, weekly, monthly if needed in basically any output format - but it is also possible to get a SFTP folder where we in real time for each single CDR do deliver a file that allow the operator to perform real time processing in own servers.
It is also possible to generate tyraffic reports periodically for partners if this would be a benefit for them - covering activations, traffic, general usage and billing related details.
Multi Level Rating
Unity are by default performing rating on multiple levels at the same time - allowing operator to have rating performed in direction of resellers and partners, and have partners rating their end customers directly in Unity - that is allowing the partner to manage their rates directly in Unity and be generating invoices or traffic data feed that reflect the charges to their end customers..
Benefits of Convergent Billing
Convergent billing would help satellite operator in achieving the following major benefits:
- Single product and service catalogue gives better time to market and reduced cost of implementation.
- A unified bill enables cross-service discounts, so that customers who order multiple services can receive preferential pricing.
- Convergent billing enables multi-service packaging and pricing, whereby existing customers are enticed to add new services and new customers are attracted by innovative service bundles.
- Centralized customer care and support for both type of customers ( pre-paid and post-paid).
- Customer don’t need to validate Iridium, Inmarsat, Thuraya etc. they get all in a uniform layout across satellite networks
Traffic Collectors
Traffic files generated in networks like Inmarsat, Iridium, Thuraya, Stratos, Airbus, AST, Station711... All have their own traffis data format and are delivered in different ways - Unity can collect files automatically from SFTP, FTP, emails, in file drop zones and on the fly will it be prepossining these files so that each single record get seperated from a file or data feed that contain multiple data records.
Collector will handle remote file archiving functionality and if files are encrypted will it also handle the decrypt process then be pre mediating data files to allow our mediation handler to complete the task.
Unity Collector is a Enterprise Java based multi thread application with flexible web services to support integration with any third party application or connect handler that can be dealing with any normal data delivery methods
Mediation
Collected and split data files will be mediated into unrated traffic events - when the relevant traffic data will be extracted so their are in a uniform format that our rating module can be processing.
Current information explosion trends are fuelling the demands of advanced integration infrastructures with the ability to share and synchronise data across different applications and support business intelligence and real time analytics to monitor and improve traffic business processes. This is the reason why we have put a lot of energy into having dedicated and many mediation handlers that each can be dealing with a specific file and data format - this ensure that we can maintain and keep the same rating functionality across the different type of satellite services. So a new file format will normally result in a new mediation module being created that will be handling the basic data translation.
Unity are today mediating most of the known satellite providers traffic CDR formats allowing a fast integration of existing data feed.
Rating
Chargeable data are devided into different types, time based fees like subscrioption fees or traffic data from voice calls, data sessions, streaming sessions and similar, as well as event based fees from example events like disconnect, suspend and alike.
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Invoicing
Invoices for customers are an important part of running a sucessful satellite busines. Unity come with a comprehensive invoicing capability allowing a single invoice to be generated that cover basically any technology and service offered by the operator, meaning Iridium traffic, Inmarsat traffic, hardware leasing, installation fees, credit note handling and similar will all be able to be added on a single invoice or can be selected to be split across different invoices if needed.
Reporting
Unity Report functionality helps operator and organisation to increase customer retention and improve margins by providing real time data analysis, with integrated workflow and comprehensive traffic statistics. Relationship-based modeling allows operator to strike the right balance between customer satisfaction and profitability, even in negotiated pricing deals based on the customers ongoing traffic pattern.
Organisations can experiment with multiple report models to calculate optimum product pricing strategies, introduce innovative new products and deliver product bundles to meet the needs of different customer segments. Unity Repor functionality supports different standard formats but offer the operator to get own dedicated reports generated online or as periodically emailed reports across basically any data currently captured in the system.