Service Credits Redeemed Through Billing

For some memberships, your customer may redeem their earned points by receiving a discount on their bill. For example, if your cable customer has earned one free pay-per-view movie, you can give them a credit the next time they get billed for a pay-per-view movie.

The base product has not provided any algorithms to credit a bill based on earned service credits. This section will identify considerations your implementers should follow when designing algorithms to redeem service credits through billing.

The recommendation is to credit the customer's bill by generating an adjustment using a pre-bill completion algorithm. This algorithm's responsibilities are as follows:

• Determine if the appropriate bill segment(s) contain the charges that need to be credited. For example, if the service credit is for a free pay-per-view movie, determine if the customer has been billed for a pay-per-view movie.
• Determine if the customer's current service credit balance for this program. For example, how many free pay-per-view movie credits are left?
• Create an adjustment to credit the appropriate service agreement by the eligible credit amount.
• Update the service credit membership balance by creating a new SC event with a credit for the number of points redeemed. Link the adjustment to the event as a contributed to FT.
• Consider cancel/rebill situations. If a cancel/rebill has occurred, determine if there is a change to the redeemed credits. For example, if the original bill had one pay-per-view movie that was credited and the new bill also has one pay-per-view movie, no change is needed to the service credit balance. If the original bill had more pay-per-view movies than the new bill, perhaps one or more redeemed service credit points should be reinstated. If the original bill had fewer pay-per-view movies than the new bill, perhaps more points should be redeemed.

You may wonder why we don't recommend crediting the customer's bill while generating the bill segment. For example, use pre-processing calculation rule to determine if any points should be redeemed and use a calculation rule to generate a bill calculation line with the credit amount.

The reason for this is that cancel/rebill logic is not straightforward. Algorithms executed during rate application should NOT perform any updates, such as updating the service credit membership balance. The balance should be updated using a bill segment freeze algorithm or a bill completion algorithm.

When a cancellation occurs, the service credit balance should be updated to reinstate the redeemed points. Again, this should occur when the cancellation is frozen or at bill completion time. If you perform a cancel/rebill, the calculation of the rebill segment does not have the up-to-date information about the service credit balance because the reinstatement of the points by the canceled segment has not occurred yet.