ConnectSM for Cloud Commerce

Frequently Asked Questions





  • SUBSCRIPTION AND RECURRING REVENUE MANAGEMENT
  • What customer touch-points can I use to take subscription orders?
    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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  • Do you support complex products and services?
    Yes, Connect:SM has supported many very complex product and service definitions across a wide range of industries and types of customers over the past 20 years. Our flexible product catalog makes it easy to build and manage products and services whether they have one level, multiple levels, nested definitions, or require special rules or taxation. Our robust package and bundle capabilities extend the flexibility even further. Complex billing for multi-level programs and plans such as reseller programs, corporate accounts, partners, and family plans is supported via the optional Connect:SM n-tier account hierarchy structure.
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  • What types of pricing and charge models does Connect:SM support?
    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.

    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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  • What types of subscriptions does Connect:SM support?
    Connect:SM enables customers to flexibly design any type of subscription they require. Subscriptions can be built for any type of product or service and use any type of pricing and charging model. Subscriptions terms and billing periods can be flexibly designed to accommodate your business requirements. Subscription availability can be defined globally, regionally, by type of customer, or down to individual customers. Subscription renewals can be configured for automated processing. Workflow associated with renewals can be defined globally, by customer type, credit class, or individual customer. Customer defined email notice templates, frequency and scheduling options, and service suspension/cancellation capabilities are all included.
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  • Does Connect:SM support multiple subscriptions on a single account?
    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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  • What types of orders does Connect:SM support and how do they work?
    Connect:SM supports new orders created in Connect:SM or fed via our web service API, change orders, service orders, work orders, trouble ticket orders, suspension and cancellation orders. A Change Order may involve a new service order, a work order, a trouble ticket, or an upgrade or downgrade in subscription plan. Additionally, Connect:SM provides configurable workflow for individual types of orders recognizing that different products and services may have their own order processing steps and business rules. These same capabilities extend to the provisioning and activation workflow processes.

    The Advanced Order Management option available in Connect:SM Enterprise, extends the power and flexibility of the order process by enabling complex orders that require multiple workflows to fulfill a single order, involve multiple work groups and systems, require sophisticated business rules, extend over a period of time to complete, and separate release/commit steps during the overall workflow and to initiate billing against the order.
     
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  • Does Connect:SM support international curriences?
    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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  • Does Connect:SM support U.S. and international taxes?
    Yes. Connect:SM provides a customizable interface to create and manage tax rules to support any variations of U.S. and international taxes that are applied to products and services. In addition, BillWise supports integration with the leading tax software and service providers.

    Up to 8 levels of taxation can be associated with an individual line item. Support is provided for any location or jurisdiction, including support for European VAT, GST, and other types of international taxes and fees. Taxes are automatically entered on invoices and multiple taxes and fees can be displayed on a single invoice. Back to Top
  • How does Connect:SM help manage revenue recognition and accounting?
    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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  • Does Connect:SM support multiple channels and locations?
    Yes, Connect:SM enables customers to track activity according to individual channels and locations. Configurable business rules are available to define how the system will operate for individual channels and locations thereby enabling customers to limit or tailor offerings, order processing rules, and billing and payment processes by channel or location.
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  • How does Connect:SM help create a personalized customer interaction?
    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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  • How does Connect:SM help evaluate my product and service performance?
    Connect:SM tracks all transactions and provides a number of customizable reports that can analyze individual or groups of products and services.
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  • How does Connect:SM help track and analyze customers?
    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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  • Does Connect:SM provide a marketing sandbox?
    Yes, the marketing sandbox capability enables product managers and marketing executives to simulate how new rate plans would perform using a dataset of current customers. Multiple sandboxes can be created and multiple data sets can be defined. This ensures that rate plans are tested and results modeled before deployment into the production environment.
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  • Can I use external marketing services with BillWise's products?
    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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  • SUBSCRIPTION BILLING AND PAYMENT OPERATIONS
  • What if I have a mistake or problem with an invoice or payment run?
    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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  • Does your system enable me to personalize billing and payment preferences?
    Yes, Connect:SM offers a number of options for billing and payment preferences such as bill in advance or arrears, balance forward or open item treatment, credit treatment, dunning rules, exception handling workflow, and many others.
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  • How does your system manage accounts receivable?
    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 visibility is provided at all steps in the process.
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  • What is a bill run? What flexibility does your system provide me?
    A bill run is the process of generating charges, applying them to invoices or credit cards, and generating the invoice or payment process transaction. Customers have the ability to define business rules and workflow for billing and payment processes. Connect:SM provides the ability to verify and correct items before committing to invoice or payment processing, and generates a selection of reports for use by operations and finance post processing. Connect:SM supports up to 28 periods for cycle billing, customizable invoice formats, and invoice delivery by parcel post or email. Invoices, payment data, and transaction detail can all be displayed on the customer portal with the ability for customers to download or print invoices.
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  • Does the system support one-time payments?
    Yes. One-time payments can be processed either as standalone and/or with recurring or usage fees.
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  • What forms of payment does your system support?
    Connect:SM support all forms of payment including cash, check, credit card, ACH, debit card, gift card, voucher, electronic check, wire transfer, and lockbox payment.
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  • Do you support balance management?
    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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  • Do you support micro transactions?
    Yes, Connect:SM enables you to accept transactions that normally would be too small in amount to handle via your established payment methods. Micro-transactions support is provided in conjunction with the real-time balance management functionality to enable the aggregation of small charges to an account based on a prepaid balance or authorized credit limit. Micro-transactions with balance management support can be combined with other payment methods on individual accounts.
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  • What is auto-pay functionality and how does it work?
    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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  • Are credit card numbers encrypted in the system?
    Yes, all sensitive customer data is encrypted in accordance with PCI DSS 1.2 standards.
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  • Can I customize the workflow and templates for my credit card and invoice dunning processes?
    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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  • Does the system notify of upcoming credit card expirations?
    Yes, Connect:SM provides a configurable report of all credit card expiration dates and the ability to define notification rules and templates for outbound communications through standard email or IVR.
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  • Is there the ability to restrict access/view of credit card information by user?
    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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  • APIs AND INTEGRATION
  • Why are open APIs and integration important?
    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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  • What languages do your APIs support?
    BillWise supports any programming language that can make web services calls.
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  • Do you offer customers a sandbox for testing?
    Yes, BillWise offers sandbox environments.
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  • How can I get access to the sandbox?
    Access to sandboxes are limited to registered evaluation customers. Please contact for more details.
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  • How do I integrate my e-commerce website with BillWise's products?
    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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  • Do you integrate with CRM systems?
    Yes, BillWise has integrated with a number of CRM systems over the years and provides a web service API for situations where a pre-packaged integration does not exist.
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  • Do you integrate with payment gateways?
    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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  • Do you integrate with provisioning and service activation systems?
    Yes, BillWise has over 20 years of experience and expertise integrating in real-time with a wide range of provisioning and service activation systems via our robust web service API. Back to Top
  • Do you integrate with network elements?
    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 convergent services billing mediation platform makes the process simple and shields the billing system and other downstream business applications from the complexities involved.
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  • Do you integrate with credit and collection services?
    Yes, BillWise has integrated with many credit authorization and collection services over the years and provides a web service API for situations where a pre-packaged integration does not exist.
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  • Do you integrate with marketing systems?
    Yes, BillWise can feed marketing systems via CSV formatted files and/or via a web service API.
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  • Do you integrate with print vendors?
    Yes, BillWise has integrated with a number of print vendors over the years and provides a web service API for situations where a pre-packaged integration does not exist.
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  • Do you integrate with ERP and Accounting packages?
    Yes, BillWise has integrated with most of the leading ERP and Accounting systems over the years.
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  • Can you export data from the system?
    Yes, BillWise supports the ability to export data from the system via a CSV formatted file and/or via a web service API.
     
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  • IMPLEMENTATION AND SUPPORT
  • Does working with BillWise require professional services?
    BillWise's professional services team is an important part of every project to ensure a successful go-live and on-time delivery. Each new implementation includes a minimum level of professional services required for the customer to learn best practices and knowledge required to understand how to use Connect:SM on a daily basis. We also offer a "soft landing" service for customers that want operational support during the first 90 days of production use with gradual transition of tasks to customer personnel.
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  • What types of services are available?
    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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  • What are Managed Services?
    BillWise's Managed Services offering is designed for companies choosing a single-tenant deployment option, rather than our standard hosted, multi-tenant Billing-as-a-Service deployment option.

    For companies who desire to outsource some portion of the day-to-day technical operations activities associated with the applications, BillWise provides the flexibility needed for each company's unique requirements. We can host and manage the end-to-end applications in our data center or we can provide managed services for solutions hosted in our client's, or a co-location provider's, data center. Our data center located in Irvine CA and is a SAS-70 Type II certified facility.

    Clients can maintain complete control over the physical infrastructure, hardware, communications, data, system access and functions without the need for specially-trained professional staff. Our billing management and customer care experts are responsible for ensuring the systems are running optimally 24/7. This keeps our client's billing automation investment to a minimum while providing optimal customer care performance necessary for acquiring, retaining, and expanding their customer and market reach.
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  • What Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services are available?
    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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  • What deployment models does BillWise support?
    BillWise offers SaaS and licensed deployment models for certain of our applications. We recognize that businesses have different preferences, internal capabilities, and operating cultures that drive decisions on what is the best way to deploy software in their organizations.

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  • How long does an implementation typically take?
    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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  • What does the implementation process look like?
    The implementation process has phases including planning, design, configuration and tailoring, data migration and integration, testing and training. A dedicated project leader is engaged with the customer throughout each phase to ensure successful delivery and customer success.
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  • What are typical implementation fees?
    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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  • What is the post deployment support?
    BillWise's standard is 24/7 support. We also offer tailored managed service programs for those clients who want to outsource selected operational tasks.
     
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  • RELIABILITY AND SECURITY FAQ
  • How does BillWise ensure that no one has unauthorized access to my confidential customer data?
    BillWise's approach to securing confidential customer data includes the infrastructure that powers our service which is housed in a state-of-the-art hosting facility with 24x7 security, a logical layer that includes firewalls and intrusion detection systems and our policies and best practices where we maintain a security practice comprised of strong passwords, change control, two factor authentication, and security policies which are reviewed on a regular basis.
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  • What happens in the event of system failure? How do you ensure that my customer data is safe?
    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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  • How does BillWise secure credit card, ACH, and personal data?
    All sensitive customer data is encrypted in accordance with PCI DSS v1.2 standards. Personal data is secured according to Safe Harbor Standards. All call detail records are secured according to CPNI requirements.
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  • What steps do you take to ensure that only authorized personnel have access to your servers and infrastructure?
    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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  • Is BillWise PCI Compliant? SAS70? Safe Harbor? CPNI?
    Yes, BillWise maintains compliance with all the various regulatory and compliance requirements that our customers encounter.
     
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ConnectSM for Cloud Commerce

  »  Products
  »  Pricing
  »  Orders
  »  Accounts
  »  Billing
  »  Payments
  »  Platform
  »  Security
  

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Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce
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Why Billing is Important
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Which Edition is Right for Me?
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