BillWise: Frequently Asked Questions

We help our customers stay connected with their customers. We take a holistic, end-to-end approach that enables our customers to drive revenues through innovative and compelling offerings, gain efficiencies and control through process automation, and ensure an exceptional customer interaction experience at all customer touch-points by enabling a 360º view of all customer activity.

At BillWise, we have over 20 years of experience providing customer life-cycle billing solutions to a diverse community of subscription and recurring revenue businesses around the globe, including Communications service providers, Voice 2.0 application and platform providers, Web 2.0 businesses, Cloud Computing providers, and traditional enterprises of all sizes. We provide innovative solutions that drive more value from our client's everyday interactions with their customers and employees. We are acknowledged as a "trusted partner" in our customer's success and take great pride in helping them enhance the value of their customer relationships.
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BillWise's Customer Life-cycle Billing Solutions offer end-to-end integrated Web-based billing, payment, and customer care solutions to help companies, in a variety of industries, build, manage, and grow their subscription and recurring revenue businesses.

Unlike traditional billing software that focuses solely on automating financial transactions, our solutions enable our clients to stay connected to their customers throughout the customer life-cycle and bridges the gap between billing and other operational processes. Our solutions provide near real-time information access at every stage of the order processing and transaction management cycle. This enables our clients to effectively run their subscription business and efficiently service their customers. Everything needed to complete an order or service a customer inquiry is available in one place eliminating time-consuming, error-prone processes that can negatively impact customer relationships.

Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce - BillWise's Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce is a leader in Customer Life-cycle Billing Solutions for Cloud Commerce. The integrated, end-to-end system provides functionality to manage customers, orders, products, inventory, billing, payments, as well as support marketing and provide integration to other critical business applications. Different editions are available to address the varying degrees of complexity and scale represented by the diverse businesses of our customers.

Connect:SM for Communications - BillWise's Connect:SM for Communications provides convergent communications service billing capabilities for small and mid-market communications service providers such as Cable MSOs. Built on the Connect:SM platform, it includes those capabilities unique to communications service providers delivering voice, broadband, wireless, and/or video services to their customers. Different editions are available to address the varying degrees of complexity and scale. Connect:SM for Communications is available as a SaaS offering, managed service offering, or in traditional license form. 

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Without the right subscription management and billing platform, businesses will be held back from achieving their growth objectives and increasing revenues. For example, an inadequate subscription billing platform will prevent businesses from (a) launching new subscription products to market, (b) adjusting pricing to respond to competition and/or market conditions, and (c) establishing new channels to accelerate revenue. Many businesses believe that they can manage the complexities of their subscription businesses by adding headcount, relying on manual processes or outdated systems, however, especially in today’s economy, it’s a well known fact that these approaches result in lower margins, operational inefficiency, and slower revenue growth. Any business today – startup, mid-market, or enterprise -- needs a flexible, on-demand billing and subscription management platform to grow and automate their business. Without one, it will become more and more difficult to survive and compete in today’s changing economic environment.
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According to a DM Review magazine article by Claudia Imhoff, et al., "The purpose of the customer life cycle is to define and communicate the stages through which a customer progresses when considering, purchasing and using products, and the associated business processes a company uses to move the customer through the customer life cycle." ["Building the Customer-Centric Enterprise". DM Review Magazine. November, 2002.. Retrieved 2008-11-04.]

This is different from Customer Relationship Management which is an overall corporate philosophy of managing relationships with each customer in order to provide a better overall customer experience. The practical challenge of so many CRM implementations is they are applied selectively and sporadically over time, and often used by limited groups within an organization.

When Customer Life-cycle Management is an embedded part of your integrated customer care, order management, billing, and payment systems the whole organization is forced to practice the CRM philosophy because the application enforces compliance, automates processes, and provides the 360º view of all customer activity needed by everyone who interacts with a customer, including the customer self serving themselves at your website.
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Accounting systems have the ability to manually create and track invoices but lack a core Rating and Billing Engine to automate the calculation and processing of invoices, payments, and charges that are based on multiple and different subscription terms, subscription products and rate plans, and subscription triggers. For a subscription and/or recurring business, a subscription management and billing platform like Connect:SM provides an operational platform that integrates with your accounting system such as Intacct, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Oracle, Great Plains, or SAP. If you only use an accounting system, all processes required to manage your subscriptions will likely be done manually.
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BillWise is a closely held, private company that is debt-free and cash flow positive. Major shareholders provide any financial backing required. BillWise's leadership team includes industry veterans with a passion for billing and decades of billing experience in subscription and recurring revenue businesses across a wide variety of industries, and many years of association with our solutions.
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BillWise has two types of partnering relationships, business partners and integration partners. We partner with a wide variety of 3rd party applications and services to make it easy for our customers to integrate and deploy 3rd party applications and services that are important to their business (see the Interfaces and Integration section for more information).

We also maintain ongoing business partnering relationships with a variety of value-added solution providers and integrators that either private label our billing solutions or sell them alongside their business solutions and services (see Private Label Program for more information). If you have a question whether we support a specific 3rd party application or service please contact us at .
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