Customer Care

The Customer Care modules are focused on delivery of various features that are aimed to provide total control of the client, designed to retain existing clients and convert new client leads.

To create the required optimum structure for Customer Relationships Management, the modules provide such product capabilities as:

  • N-tier customer billing and comprehensive discount and payment structures;
  • N-tier organisation structure;
  • Multi-address system;
  • Preferred customer currency and language.

To summarise, Customer Care is a module controlling a whole spectrum of functions relevant to a customer, from lead stage to account termination, including account registration, deactivation, etc.

Service

Our Service modules accommodate the following services: Wire Line, GSM, GPRS, DAMPS, NMT, TDMA, CDMA (incl. 2000 1X), UMTS, ISP, VoIP, Backbone Data Transmission, CATV, Utilities, etc.

These modules support the relevant services and products subscribed to, driving the Customer Care and Charging (tarrifing) suites, storing charges, tariffs and discounts which can be applicable for the service during the whole life cycle.

The Multiple Service modules provided, give an easy-to-use/easy-to-add capability to a customer, based on the following design module features, such as:

  • Object oriented structure;
  • Contract level;
  • VAS level;
  • Connection object;
  • GPRS support.

Charges

The Charges module provides for advanced charging capabilities, giving the customer a flexible tool to enable the maximisation of the customer's ARPU, for example:

  • Charge Plan entity;
  • Tariff system;
  • N-tier billing hierarchy for contract, service and VAS level;
  • Multi-currency.

Rating Engine — for post-paid Billing

  • Supports multi, rollover, shared bundles, cross-band call calculation, multi-types units of the call(s).
  • Allows flexible product packaging. It supports major rate plans offered by service providers around the world. The system enables price plans to be made for each customer category. Alternatives can be provided to the normal pricing of traffic/calls. Separate price plans will allow the operator to assign customised prices to different customer groups for the same type of call.
  • Discounts can also be offered and can be for open end-dates or fixed end-dates. Volume discounts at the service level and account level can be supported. New rate plans can be tested using live data from the production environment before implementation.
  • The tariff module (rate plan module) has access to all relevant data elements in the system and can provide for "friends and family" plans, home-zone rating and accommodate practically all types of sophisticated and flexible charging plans devised our customers' Marketing Departments to suit their individual requirements — for example, promotional pricing for specific periods of service (30 days, 60 days, 90 days), changing price plans at any time to be effective immediately pro-rated charges (customer moving from unlimited usage plan to limited usage plan or vice versa).
  • The addition of value added services in the middle of a billing cycle with pro-rated charges is also supported.
  • It supports GPRS mode as well.

(RTBS with Parlay/OSA platform implementation)

  • Shares the same data, tariff and discount system with post-paid functions of the Rating Engine;
  • Shares the same data, tariff and discount system with post-paid functions of the Rating Engine;Our real-time Billing System enhances existing Billing Systems and by interfacing with eg the HP Open Call system communicates with the core network using industry-standard Parlay/OSA APIs. RTBS is enhanced existing product with a multi-session capability to establish real-time control of several simultaneous charging sessions for the same account. Implementation of the Parlay/OSA APIs includes, amongst other features:
    1. Call Control Prepaid Application ("voice" events);
    2. OSA Framework, Call Control and User Interaction SCFs (it is assumed that full-featured FW and Call Control SCFs are provided by the relevant Network);
    3. Charging Applications, which allows user account management using UI SCF;
    4. Additional services can be supported by PPA (SMS, MMS, packet events, etc).
Graphical representation of our billing system

Ledgers

The Ledgers module supports truly convergent multi-services billing, thereby providing the customer with a flexible and easy-to-modify methodology which enables his clients to pay for different services. Significantly it gives our customer a powerful tool to manage his clients depending on their payment behavior and the customer's pre-defined classification rules. These are based on the following built-in features:

  • Item-based allocation;
  • Tax reconciliation on item level;
  • Manual invoices linked to invoice run;
  • "Balance is in credit" control.‍

Stock

The Stock group of modules provides the customer with wide range of methods to intelligently manage very different ranges of resources made available to his clients.

The Stock group of modules are extensive but are based on user friendly and straightforward design principles, which include innovative capabilities such as the "Production Depot" program suite which enable (without the necessity of creating a new structure) the inclusion of new and unique items.

Online web-based Billing

The web-enabled modules provide the customer with a wide range of cost-effective options for managing its business. It supplies a customer with secure remote access to 100%-complete Billing System functionality through the web window, which it can offer to its clients.

Self-Care web interface for clients

Depending on the level of authority delegated to the customer's clients, the Self-Care suite of programs enable the clients to look after their own affairs — for example adding/removing subscribers, altering their internal billing hierarchy, changing rate plans, ordering stock, etc — thereby lessening the burden on the Customer Care departments with the attendant benefits of improving clients' commitment and minimising churn.

ASP modules

The customer is offered a variety of ASP modules available for on/off-line use by the customer itself or on an outsourcing base (b2b/b2c implementation scenario/services). These include, for example: Customer Care, Service, Stock, Finance, Credit Control, Mediation/Provisioning, Report, Charges, Tariffs, Address, Multi-Currency, Invoice Run, Interconnect, Roaming, Rating Engine etc.

Billing for ASP is available as a virtually real-time option.

Self-Care web interface for dealers

Another of the web-enabled modules which, depending on the level of authority delegated, empowers the customer's individual dealers to control and monitor their own customers within the subscriber base, effectively in real time.

Interconnect

The Interconnect suite provides the customer with advanced options for cross-charging and accounting with its interconnect counterparts, including Clearing House, Routing and Reconciliation capabilities.

Roaming

The Roaming suite of programs complies with the present TAP3 industry standard, including clearing house capabilities.

Mediation

NGMediate — this mediation device product uses CORBA and Java technology to provide customers with an easily understood and manageable product, designed not only to interface with the various modules in the Zygo Billing product line but also with other billing and customer care systems (provided by other suppliers) as a separate unit, with or without a GUI front end or as a separate class.

It facilitates the collection of call-record data from the network elements, to convert this to the "usable data" required by the rating engine and enables the Customer Care suite modules to send commands to the network elements of the various telecommunications networks (see Service).

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WorkFlow & WorkPoint

Incorporated within the systems is the ability, via the Java messaging service (JMS), to initiate workflow processes for almost any database process or procedure. For example, the provisioning process at the CSR level and the system's ability to manage the provisioning process once the order has been committed. The data model allows organisations to define specific workflow processes for as many items as may be needed and, once set up at the implementation stage, are then maintained throughout the use of the system.

In day-to-day operations, CSR's and back office provisioning personnel need to gather information about pending provisioning orders as quickly and easily as possible, and manipulate events and dates in order to meet new circumstances as they occur. This is enabled by allowing CSRs and provisioning personnel to gather this information using a fully configurable graphical user interface. It follows that the key concept to the management of workflow processes is the WorkPoint.

By using our Workflow & WorkPoint engines during the provisioning process the status of all transactions can be traced and the WorkPoint determined at any time.

Integration

At the heart of the Zygo Technologies solution is the NGMediate suite of programs, which not only provides the interfaces for the various stand-alone modules in the Zygo Technologies product line but also enables these modules (or any individual module(s) to interface with each other or indeed those of other existing systems.

The Integration module is the powerful platform that provides a customer with a wide range of capabilities to incorporate its legacy information systems with those that are required to be deployed.

GUI

Our Graphic User Interface is extremely user friendly, easy to set up and re-design. The GUI offers an extensive set of localisation formats and options and accommodates advanced industry standards. In particular, its components are:

  • Table setup driven;
  • Object oriented;
  • Multi lingual;
  • User PC setup driven for date/time/number masks and language;
  • AWT & Swing components based;
  • Drag & Drop development mode;
  • User self navigation enabled.

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Performance and Scalability

Our systems' N-tiered architecture provides the ideal scalable platform to support any client from start-up to millions of subscribers, and for processing the tens of millions of call records.

The system has been designed to provide the best possible performance for a variety of different sized customers. Its N-tiered architecture allows for multiple servers to be used to distribute the processing load and maintain high performance.

The system is scalable from running application server and database tiers on the smallest UNIX server and the user interface on multiple attached Java stations or PCs to running the database on multiple distributed servers and the application servers on multiple NT servers, with as many clients interfaced through the NT servers as necessary.