This billing entree can help you attract new corporate accounts and retain old ones.

Imagine planning a multi-course dinner for 100 em-ployees from different departments in your organization. You've chosen a chic eatery and called to make reservations. But the restaurant informs you that each guest will have the option of choosing which courses he will eat and will be charged accordingly. At the end of the dinner, you will receive a separate bill for each person, and you'll have to divvy up the bills by department and add up the totals.

What a colossal headache such a process would be! You'd probably throw up your hands in disbelief, and begin looking for another restaurant, one that would better accommodate your needs.

Corporate customers of wireless companies operate the same way. They tend to give their business to the provider that can make their lives easier. So why would a national corporation choose the accounting nightmare of paying separately for each of its wireless subscribers? Why would the corporation want to enter the data from all of those bills into a spreadsheet program to generate the enterprise reports that it needs?

If given the choice, most corporate customers would opt for one bill, in the format of their choice, for all of their wireless subscribers. This reality makes consolidated or aggregated billing one way for wireless-service providers to entice corporate customers.

Cooking It Up There are two types of consolidated billing: intercarrier and intracarrier. A service provider with a national footprint can aggregate bills for calls that originated on its own network in various regions of the country. Wireless-service providers also can act as consolidators for corporate customers by contracting with secondary providers. The secondary providers supply wireless service in areas where the primary provider's network doesn't reach, but the primary provider owns the account. The participating providers usually send their billing data to a third party, which provides settlement for the providers and produces a paper or electronic bill with the primary provider's name on it.

"I think as we go forward there's going to be more demand for this type of billing," said Parry Snow, Cibernet vice president of global marketing. But he admitted that two ingredients are necessary to make the process work more smoothly in the future: real-time systems and service providers adept at making business arrangements.

Right now, U.S. service providers face the challenge of incompatible billing systems. The problem applies both to internal and external billing systems. For example, Alltel, SBC and Verizon Wireless all use more than one billing system internally, a fact primarily attributable to recent mergers and acquisitions.

One problem with the use of different billing systems is that each system typically would be configured to rate the calls that originate in its region.

"So the individual carriers would have to go into their rating and billing (records), zero out that information in their local systems, then provide the detail to an aggregator that puts it together and applies the appropriate corporate rates and discounts," Snow said.

In order to share information, the participating providers need to collect the same kinds of information and uniformly populate the fields in their account records. To do this, they must use a standardized billing format, such as Cibernet's Mabel standard.

The Mabel standard is a post-invoice record-consolidation format that enables collaborating providers to submit account information in a uniform way to a billing aggregator. But, like most standards, Mabel continues to change to reflect providers' needs and changes within the industry.

According to Snow, one of the biggest challenges of the post-invoice consolidation process involves identifying the call-detail records associated with a particular account.

"So it goes back to the accumulation of records in a billing system or mediation device and identifying those records as belonging to a specific business account," Snow said. "Once that's done, the challenge becomes how to rate those individual calls."

Because more than one billing site is involved, and employees at each site have to manipulate the data manually, aggregated bills usually are not as timely as individual bills. For instance, aggregated bills that GTE Telecommunication Services (GTE TSI) processed for its clients in August contained July billing information, and the bills didn't reach the corporate customers until September, according to Terri Clark, GTE TSI supervisor of national accounts.

Here's how the aggregation process works at GTE TSI. The providers involved in serving a corporate account send their billing information to GTE TSI on tape in the Mabel format. The information also can be sent in the form of a paper bill, which GTE TSI's paper group would enter into an electronic database.

GTE TSI works with the account's primary service provider to determine how the billing information will be organized for the end user.

Sometimes information transmitted to GTE TSI is missing necessary details, such as a phone number or an account number. Such errors are referred to as exceptions. The exceptions must be corrected before GTE TSI can gather the billing information into a final statement for the end user.

GTE TSI's Clark identified the following benefits of consolidated billing. It:

- Provides a single point of contact for corporate customers

- Presents billing data in an organized way

- Creates monthly billing summaries that can be imported into database and spreadsheet applications

- Enables regional wireless providers to create a national footprint by forming relationships with other providers to provide network services to national accounts

- Reduces the possibility that high-value, corporate customers will churn.

The downsides, according to Clark, are:

- Errors often occur when data is being entered into the Mabel format

- Bills are not very timely

- Data sometimes must be transferred from paper bills into an electronic format.

An Alternative Yani Blanca, Amdocs director of product marketing, advocates the events-based method of consolidated billing, a method he said eliminates most of the cons. Events-based consolidation involves using a near-real-time method of collecting and rating calls before they reach invoice level. The way it works is that all of the events of a particular corporate customer are sent to a single repository, where the consolidated bills are produced.

"As soon as the event appears in the front-end system, you can send it to a biller that gathers all the events and taxes them at one time," Blanca said.

He maintains that events-based billing is simpler primarily because it eliminates the need to synchronize the billing cycles of various billers.

One downside of event-based billing is that it requires a specialized network that enables the transfer of event data from the switch to the billing repository.

According to Mary Clark, Cibernet vice president of operations, TIA already has developed a standard for event-based billing.

"The concept behind it is that you would have an event occur, then you would capture the event at a generation point, process it into this (TIA/EIA 124-B) format and then forward it to a collection point," Clark said. "And you would do all of that in real time. But as far as I know, no one has ever deployed (TIA/EIA) 124. It requires very specific messaging, and it requires a completely different network."

Although Clark concedes that a near-real-time exchange of billing data in the context of roaming or consolidated billing is desirable, she's skeptical about providers investing in such a specialized system, especially in this Internet age in which more enterprise functions are being performed online.

A Challenging Sauce But even an Internet-based consolidated-billing application probably won't be deployed in the near future, Clark said, commenting on how legacy billing systems complicate the process. She explained that because most large providers' systems have been modified in a patchwork fashion over the past 10 years, they tend to be insufficient, but the alternative of investing in a new system may be even less desirable.

"When wireless carriers are dealing with significantly bigger issues, you face (comments and questions such as) `It's not really broken,' and `Am I going to generate additional revenue by making these changes?'" Clark said. "And those questions bring cost-benefit analysis into play every time."

Other consolidating challenges include the level of detail that can be required in the billing records of major accounts, Clark said. For instance, the corporate customer with hundreds of wireless users could require details of all home-market usage as well as roaming usage.

Then there is the volume of data involved. This particularly affects the aggregator, which struggles to format the information for the end user.

"It may come to you on a Mabel tape, but how do you get it onto a paper bill?" Clark asked. "How do you transfer the information so that it is usable by the major account? That is the biggest challenge, particularly now that services are becoming more complex because you're not just dealing with voice."

Consolidating data-service bills presents new challenges.

"The ability to capture the information in a usable format once you add data services is going to be a considerable challenge to wireless carriers that are consolidating this information," Clark said.

Clark also has witnessed consolidators struggling with issues such as how to package data services and how to provide revenue-boosting service bundles to major accounts. Companies are going to have to examine equipment and time costs, and determine how to offer value-added services that attract corporate customers and are cost-efficient for the service provider, she recommended.

With data services, it also will be important to determine which services you can guarantee to corporate customers, whether they are at home or roaming, Clark said. Some data services will not be available right away in all roaming markets.

According to Clark, the biggest challenge for corporate consolidators in the data environment will be gaining the ability to provide ubiquitous data services to customers. The developers of the Mabel standard will have the task of being more specific in identifying the sources of the services.

Currently, Mabel tracks the sources of services at the market level using system identification numbers (SIDs) and billing identification numbers (BIDs). By comparing the SID, a 15-bit binary number transmitted by a serving system's cell site, with the SID programmed into a handset, service providers can determine that roaming is occurring. BIDs identify a service provider's geographic territory or members of the provider's subscriber base.

Despite the many challenges of consolidating billing for corporate accounts, some industry insiders and analysts say it will become more popular in the wireless industry. The reasons given vary but include the possibility that wireless providers may begin to use the service to attract small- and medium-size corporate customers, rather than concentrating on the largest corporate users. The increasing popularity of CRM and the increasing need of wireless providers to gain and retain high-value customers also may supply incentives to become involved in consolidation.