Collecting Information About Customers

3 Collecting Information About Customers

Learn how to collect and manage information about your customers in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM).

Topics in this document:

Making Notes about Customers

You can add notes to accounts to record information obtained from customers and to explain why you performed various actions.

Both Billing Care and Customer Center categorize notes to differentiate them when they are displayed in the Notes dialog box and to enable other tools, such as reporting applications, to gather a specific type of note from your BRM database. Note categories include:

General Notes
A/R Charge Credit Card
A/R Credit Account
A/R Credit Item
A/R Debit Account
A/R Open Dispute
A/R Set Credit Limit
A/R Settle Dispute
A/R Write-Off
Account/Service Status Change

General notes, such as notes about the best time of day to call a customer, apply to the entire account. Notes in all other categories apply to specific actions, such as adjustments, charges, credits, disputes, write-offs, and status changes.

A CSR can retrieve a list of notes associated with an account. Each note includes the name of the CSR who created.

Collecting a Summary of Activities Performed on an Account

You collect a summary of activities performed on an account by using Newsfeed. Enable Newsfeed for each event you want to collect data about.

You can enable Newsfeed for the following events:

Accounts receivable (A/R), which includes currency adjustments, noncurrency adjustments, open disputes, closed disputes, refunds, write-offs, write-off reversals, and collections.
Payments, which includes payments, payment method changes, and payment reversals.
Account, which includes name or contact information changes, account status changes, service status changes, and services (for example, a SIM card) attached or detached from the account, and billing information changes.
Charges, which includes one-time charges, recurring charges, cycle charges, purchase charges, purchase and cancellation of a package or bundle, bill issued, and bill issued mid-cycle.

To enable Newsfeed for an event:

Open the BRM_home/sys/data/config/pin_notify file in a text editor.
Uncomment the entry for the events for which you want to enable Newsfeed:
```
180  0   event_name
```
where event_name is the name of the event that you want a summary of.

For example:
```
180  0    /event/billing/account/adjustment
```
This example means that opcode 180 (PCM_OP_ACT_PROCESS_EVENTS) is called when the /event/billing/account/adjustment event occurs.
Save and close the file.
Run the following command, which loads the event notification file into the BRM database:
```
load_pin_notify   pin_notify_file
```
Stop and restart the Connection Manager (CM).

Customizing and Localizing Newsfeed

The strings for Newsfeed contain the basic text of a message and include the type of activity performed, such as account, dispute, payment, and so on.

You can customize and localize the strings for Newsfeed; for example “Payment reversed". To do so, you edit a copy of the newsfeed.en_US sample file in the BRM_home/sys/msgs/newsfeed directory. If you are loading a localized version of this file, use the correct file extension for your locale. You then use the load_localized_strings utility to load the contents of the file into the /strings objects.

When you run the load_localized_strings utility, use this command:

load_localized_strings newsfeed.locale

For information on loading the newsfeed.locale file, see "Loading Localized or Customized Strings" in BRM Developer's Guide.

Note:

To customize the values displayed in the news feed or to add new events for the news feed, use the PCM_OP_ACT_POL_PROCESS_EVENTS policy opcode. For information, see "Customizing News Feed Values and Events" in BRM Opcode Guide.

To load the customized strings for Newsfeed:

Open the BRM_home/sys/msgs/newsfeed/newsfeed.locale file in a text editor.
If you want to add new strings for Newsfeed, add the strings and map them to the reason codes from a list of reasons appropriate to the event type that are defined in the newsfeed.locale configuration file.

For example:
```
DOMAIN = "newsfeed"
STR
        ID = 132 ;
       VERSION = 60 ;
        STRING = "Payment reversed" ;
END
STR
        ID = 133 ;
        VERSION = 60 ;
        STRING = "%s original payment, %s" ;
END
```
The PCM_OP_ACT_POL_PROCESS_EVENTS policy opcode is used to customize values in News Feed and to add new events for News Feed. The placeholder character %s is replaced with the value supplied in the PIN_FLD_MESSAGE field in the input flist of PCM_OP_ACT_POL_PROCESS_EVENTS. See "Customizing News Feed Values and Events" in BRM Opcode Guide.
If you want to modify the existing strings for Newsfeed, search for the string and change the string value.
Save and close the file.
Load the strings using the load_localized_strings utility.

Customizing the List of Reasons for Account Changes

When making changes to accounts in Billing Care or Customer Center, CSRs can choose from a list of reasons that specify why a change was made.

By default, BRM provides reasons for changing an account such as:

Activating or inactivating an account
Closing or writing off an account
Crediting, debiting, or adjusting an account
Updating the payment method
Updating tax information
Charging an account

You can add, modify, or delete reasons by editing the reasons.en_US sample file in the BRM_home/sys/msgs/reasoncodes directory, where BRM_home is the directory in which the BRM server software is installed. You then use the load_localized_strings utility to load the contents of the file into /strings objects.

To run the load_localized_strings utility, use the following command:

load_localized_strings reasons.locale

where locale is the file extension (for example, en_US). If you are loading a localized version of this file, use the correct file extension for your locale.

For more information about the utility, see "load_localized_strings" in BRM Developer's Guide.

Maintaining an Audit Trail of BRM Activity

BRM provides support for auditing any object in the BRM database so that a record is kept of every version of the object for future reference. This can be used to track changes to customer profiles, customer payment information, and so on. An audit trail can also be used to track internal changes, such as changes to your price list.

Note:

Enabling an audit trail decreases system performance significantly. Keep an audit trail only for the BRM activity you feel is absolutely necessary.

To access audit trail information for a customer, you must write an application. Your application would take the pertinent customer account information (such as the customer account number and the general time the audit occurred) and find and retrieve the requested audit trail data.

See "Auditing Customer Data" in BRM Developer's Guide for the following:

Instructions on accessing audit trail information from the BRM database.
Information on how audit trails work.
Instructions on making new and existing object fields auditable.