Call re-rating solution for Virgin Media.
Accurate re-rating solution created for two separate billing systems.
Project overview.
Virgin Media, the UK’s largest cable broadband provider needed to replace an outsourced re-rating solution to reduce costs and the time taken to respond to customer requests.
The existing, outsourced, solution was expensive in terms of the fees payable by Virgin Media and, importantly, the time to respond to their customers request. The primary goal was to reduce the turnaround time of several weeks to a couple of days and to reduce the costs to the business.
PhixFlow were asked to configure a solution using the PhixFlow Low-Code Application Development Platform. The decision to appoint PhixFlow was based on previous successes in delivering cost effective, feature rich solutions, in short time frames, solving complex problems.
Project highlights.
10
%Significant cost savings, with in-house re-rating less than 10% of the external charges.
2
d.Re-rating analysis time to the customer reduced from 2-3 weeks to 2-3 days.
3
mo.Complete solution was configured and delivered in less than 3 months.
The solution.
PhixFlow was tasked to build an accurate re-rating process, for 2 separate billing systems – RBM and ICOMS, that would enable the Virgin Media to re-rate client Call Data Records (CDR) using the same logic (or as close as possible) used by their billing system. The design decided upon leveraged the rating rules from within Virgin Media’s billing system tables (tariff configuration, pricing rules, rounding rules), rather than storing them in PhixFlow. This ensured that the re-rating analysis would always have the most up-to-date data to apply to the CDRs being processed.
To achieve this, a live, on demand connection was configured using a standard PhixFlow connector. This allows the PhixFlow platform to connect directly to the Billing System, and enables a real-time extraction, transformation and use of the rating rules. The result of doing this meant that PhixFlow were able to re-rate, to exactly the same prices as the billing system, using the same tariff used by the billing system when it originally rated the CDRs. This provided penny perfect re-ratings and enabled a clear and accurate response to be delivered to the Virgin Media’s customers.
Users were able to specify:
- if they wanted all CDRs for a given invoicing period to be re-rated using a specific rating tariff
OR
- they could specify if they wanted specific A Numbers to be rated on one tariff, and others on a different tariff
OR
- each A Number to be rated on their own tariff, if required
CDRs could be read in from a file, directly from the billing system itself (using the invoice sequence they were invoiced on) or from the data warehouse which allowed re-rates to go back over 2 years.
As part of the configured solution, screens were created for the users to initiate the analysis, view the results, drill down into the presented data, filter the results to gain greater insight and to generate an report which could be provided to the end client.
The results.
The PhixFlow solution, delivered in just three months, enabled Virgin Media to dramatically reduce the time to deliver a re-rating analysis for a customer. An analysis that previously would have taken two to three weeks had now been reduced to just a few days, or hours if there was an urgent requirement.
Significant cost savings were realised, with in-house re-rating requests costing less than ten percent of the outsourced charges. This, coupled with the increased responsiveness, meant that Virgin Media were able to run their own re-rating checks to monitor internal processes.
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