Customer Life Cycle Billing

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 - BillWise's Connect:SM is a leader in Customer Life-cycle Billing solutions. 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 is available as a SaaS offering, managed service offering, or in traditional license form.

Connect:CSP - BillWise's Connect:CSP 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:CSP is available as a SaaS offering, managed service offering, or in traditional license form.

Connect RTR - With broad adoption of IP networks, CSPs are enhancing networks that initially supported a single service with flat rate monthly recurring billing. Multiple System Operators (MSOs), Internet service providers, and Internet Telephony Service providers (ITSPs) are now implementing strategic converged solutions. These include IP networks supporting an array of enhanced services such as Virtual Private Networks, enhanced telephony, IP conferencing, tiered broadband, Voice 2.0 services, and content-driven services. Integration of a usage-based billing model is essential for success. Connect RTR, BillWise's real time rating engine helps carriers of all sizes overcome these obstacles by providing an advanced, event-rating engine for IP communications services.

Access IM is BillWise's convergent service mediation platform. It shield's downstream business applications from the complexities of integrating with network devices. In real-time or batch-mode, it collects events from network devices, filters events not needed by the downstream business applications, formats the event into a usable transaction for use by the various downstream business applications, combines and correlates multiple events, when needed, to form a single transaction record, and routes valid transaction records to the various downstream business applications.
 

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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 Partnering 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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BillWise's Connect:SM can support order processing from any customer touch-point, be it website, over the phone, in person, or via a reseller. Whether using Connect:SM's customer registration or maintenance screens, or accessing Connect:SM's capabilities via our web services API, our customers are assured of being able to deliver a consistent exceptional customer interaction experience through every channel.
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Connect:SM supports both prepaid and post-paid pricing and charging models. We provide our customers with a powerful, flexible pricing and charging capability that enables them to define any type of pricing, apply promotions and discounts, and accurately charge for one-time, recurring, and usage-based transactions. Pricing can be established for any frequency, and support is included for fixed or variable plans, including tiered and volume-based. Charging can be done in advance or arrears and support is provided for synchronizing charging to the beginning of a period with proper pro-ration for interim usage, and/or partial-period charges. Special pricing can be established for individual resellers, geographic areas, customer groups, and individual customers. Full integration is provided for the optional n-tier account hierarchy structure.

An optional real-time, rules driven rating and charging capability is available for companies having special pricing requirements. Learn More

Real-time balance management capabilities allow customers to charge against their prepaid or authorized credit balance until they reach a configurable threshold for refreshing their credit balance. Configuration options are provided to establish how to handle uncompleted transactions that cross the threshold to ensure customer satisfaction. This is particularly useful for handling micro-transactions or certain prepay applications.
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Yes, Connect:SM supports multiple subscriptions on a single account. These can be different types of subscriptions with different parameters. Based on configured rules, all subscriptions can be changed to add/change/cancel products or services, change terms, pricing, and other data relating to the subscription.
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Yes. Connect:SM supports both native currencies and multiple currencies. We provide the ability to create and manage pricing for individual products and services by allowing our customers to define which currencies they want to support for individual products and services.
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Connect:SM provides the ability to create and manage revenue codes and general ledger codes that map to the revenue recognition and chart of account templates built into the customer’s accounting system. Each transaction generated from Connect:SM is stamped with a clear time period and appropriate codes.
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Connect:SM provides a number of fields, configuration options, and configurable workflows that enable personalized customer interaction at every stage of the customer life-cycle. Because BillWise also likes to practice personalized customer interaction, we provide multiple editions and configuration options for Connect:SM that reflect the diverse needs of our clients so that power is there if you need and doesn't interfere if you don't have a need for this level of sophistication.
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Connect:SM enables customers to apply user-defined, table-driven customer codes to individual customers to form groups for purposes of segmentation that can be used by marketing, sales, and finance.
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Yes, BillWise's products support both inbound and outbound interfaces with 3rd party marketing services such as address verification, campaign codes, demographic info codes, customer segmentation, and email campaigns.
 
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Connect:SM provides the ability to review invoice and payment runs before actually committing them for processing. This ensures that mistakes can be identified and corrected prior to processing. Post processing reports are provided to verify results. If a mistake is identified post-run, adjustments can be posted to individual accounts to reflect correcting entries.
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Connect:SM enables customers to define AR periods that are meaningful to their business. Credit policies can be applied globally, by group, or individually. Dunning workflow can be configured globally, by group, or individually. Automated workflows reduce errors and increase productivity. Clear and accurate visability is provided at all steps in the process.
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Yes. One-time payments can be processed either as standalone and/or with recurring or usage fees.
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Yes, Connect:SM supports balance management. Real-time balance management capabilities allow customers to charge against their prepaid or authorized credit balance until they reach a configurable threshold for refreshing their credit balance.

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Connect:SM's auto-pay functionality is the automated workflow associated with subscriptions and recurring charges paid by credit card or ACH. The auto-pay workflows can be configured to the customer's individual business practices and can be different for type of payment or types of customers.
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Connect:SM provides the ability to view all failed transactions and exceptions such as credit card expirations, invalid credit card numbers, and failed authorizations, as well as problems with ACH transactions. In addition, Connect:SM enables customers to configure business rules and templates for failed transactions and exceptions that can trigger automatic re-submissions and/or specific customer notifications.
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We protect all sensitive data at the highest compliance level in accordance with PCI DSS 1.2 standards. This means that your employees cannot view any credit card numbers and have access only to the last 4 digits and expiration date.
 
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Open APIs are important to customers because it ensures that Connect:SM can be integrated and interoperate with both internal and external applications. All our core platform services are available via web service APIs. In fact, our developers use our web service APIs to develop all of our hosted applications. Openness is a key BillWise philosophy and we have practiced this for many years by providing robust APIs that always kept pace with current technologies.
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Yes, BillWise offers sandbox environments.
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Integrating BillWise's Connect:SM to a website is done through our open web services APIs. The APIs allow the addition of subscription e-commerce through just a few calls.
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Yes, BillWise integrates with the leading payment gateways such as Authorize.Net, PayPal, Chase Paymentech, and other domestic and international providers.
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Yes, BillWise has over 20 years of experience and expertise integrating in real-time with a wide range of network elements from all the leading network infrastructure companies. Our Access IM convergent services mediation platform makes the process simple and shields the billing system and other downstream business applications from the complexities involved.
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Yes, BillWise can feed marketing systems via CSV formatted files and/or via a web service API.
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Yes, BillWise has integrated with most of the leading ERP and Accounting systems over the years.
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BillWise offers a range of professional services to meet the diverse needs of our customers, including 24/7 help desk, consulting and business process outsourcing (BPO), training and education, configuration and customization services, and conversion support. Not only do we promise you availability, security and reliability of your billing applications but also exceptional customer support and professional services. When you contact our support team, we guarantee speedy response times and resolution within predefined timeframes, based on the severity of your issues.
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BillWise offers business process outsourcing arrangements for the daily operating tasks associated with billing. Our "soft landing" service is common with new customers because BillWise takes responsibility for operating the billing system for an agreed upon period of time from initial launch, then during this time transitions daily responsibilities to the customer's billing staff. This arrangement is also favorable to companies looking at controlling costs and wanting to focus their resources on more high-value core activities for their businesses.
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Typical implementations can be completed in two to three weeks. The actual length depends on the customer’s requirements, scope of work, and customer’s timeline and phases. The scope of work and timeline is contractually agreed upon between BillWise and the customer. BillWise has a reputation for meeting and exceeding customer expectations for meeting implementation timelines because we know how important it is to the customer to accelerate time-to-market.
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BillWise's implementation fees depend upon the agreed scope of work with the customer; however, we do have some standard implementation packages that are available for our customers.
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BillWise's infrastructure is highly redundant and designed to failover in the event of a failure. Data is backed up in an encrypted format incrementally every hour and a full back up is performed daily and stored at a certified off-site location.
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The integrity of your business infrastructure is one of our primary concerns. Several steps ensure that access is limited to the data center and sensitive areas. Attention to security is one of the fundamentals of the SAS 70 Type II certification. The Network Operations Center (NOC) is located on site and manned 24x7x365. NOC personnel are trained to handle all aspects of security for the facility.

Physical access to all data center floor space and network "meet me" rooms is secured with a combination of digital camera, proximity card and biometric scanners. Upon arrival to the Data Center facilities, customers and visitors must contact the NOC in order to gain access to the secured "man-trap" area. We require three factor authentication requiring a photo id to proceed past the "man trap", authenticated card key and biometric hand scan to gain access to the data center. Customers and visitors must then provide photo ID to receive a proximity badge and be checked into the facility. Only personnel that have been pre-authorized are given proximity badges and allowed access.

All activities are monitored via strategically located video cameras which are monitored and recorded to a Digital Video Recorder and then permanently archived to DVD. Motion activated digital cameras monitor data center entrances, data center space, and all areas of critical infrastructure. The cameras are motion activated and all images are displayed on a series of monitors within the NOC. Every 24 hours, all video is archived to DVD and stored indefinitely.

NOC and facilities personnel perform regular, thorough walkthroughs of the entire facility. These walkthroughs include areas such as the roof, outside perimeter of the building, data center space and vital operations areas. During this time, the NOC staff confirms that all security measures are intact and that there are no operational abnormalities.
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