Overview of Customer Management

7 Overview of Customer Management

Learn about Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) customer management.

Topics in this document:

For information about creating accounts and managing customers, see BRM Managing Customers.

About Accounts

Every customer has an account in the BRM database. BRM accounts include or are linked to information about the customer's name and address, charge offers, discount offers, services, and balance.

In addition to customer accounts, BRM includes the following special-purpose accounts:

The root account is used by system administrators to set permissions for customer service representatives (CSRs).

Note:

BRM excludes the root account from billing. Therefore, BRM does not permit the root account to purchase product offerings.
CSR accounts allow CSRs to log in to the BRM system. You also use CSR accounts to track CSR activity. See "Setting Up Permissions in BRM Applications" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.

BRM stores account data for each customer. For example:

The customer's name and contact information.
The account and service status (for example, Active or Inactive).
The charge offers that the customer owns.
The customer's balance.
The customer's payment method (for example, invoice or credit card).

About Services

When a customer purchases a charge offer, BRM keeps a record of the charge offer's service information for the customer's account in the BRM database. For example, the email service includes information about the customer's login name and password, the maximum message size, and the maximum number of messages allowed in a mailbox.

An account can have multiple services, such as a phone service and an email service. An account can also have multiple services of the same type, such as multiple email accounts.

You can create customer accounts without charging for any services. For example, a customer can pay a monthly fee for an account with no services. In that case, a customer can add and cancel services and still be charged for having an account.

All services require a login name and password. For services such as telephony, where a customer does not use a login and password, login names and passwords can be generated automatically for internal use.

You control service usage in the following ways:

Specifying how to authorize service usage. By default, a customer is not authorized to use a service if a credit limit has been reached.
Inactivating services. When a service is inactivated, the customer cannot use it.

About Creating Customer Accounts

You can create customer accounts by using Billing Care, by using Customer Center, or by creating a custom application.

Account creation typically follows this process:

The customer calls the customer service representative (CSR) or accesses a Web page.
The customer chooses a package.
The customer provides information such as name, address, and credit card number.
The account is created in the BRM database. At account creation, a number of events occur:
- The customer information is checked by BRM to see whether it is valid and to make sure that all required information has been supplied.
- If the customer entered a credit card number, it is validated by a credit card processing service.
- If there is a purchase fee, the customer is charged.
- A welcome message is automatically sent to the customer.

Ways to Implement a Web Interface

You can implement a Web interface in the following ways:

Use Self-Care Manager. You can customize the appearance of the default Web pages by modifying Java Server Pages (JSPs). A programmer can add functionality by modifying Self-Care Manager's source code.
Create a Web interface by using the Portal Communications Module (PCM) library. If you use the PCM library, your Web server must run on a platform that supports BRM.

Adding Services to an Account

When a customer creates an account, they usually purchase charge offers that add services to their account. After the account is created, a customer can add services to their account.

To add services to an account, customers must purchase a package that includes the new service. A customer can purchase a bundle to add charge offers or discount offers for a service that they already own.

When a service is owned, you can change how the service is provisioned; for example, add mail boxes to an email account, or add IP telephony speed-dial settings.

About Activating, Inactivating, and Closing Accounts

An account's status can be active, inactive, or closed.

When an account is active, the customer can use all active services.
When an account is inactive, the customer cannot use any service. Inactivating an account prevents customers from generating usage and cycle balance impacts but does not prevent the account from being charged for bills already due.

When you inactivate an account, you also inactivate all of its services, which prevents the customer from using the services. BRM does not charge usage and cycle fees while the account is inactive, but it does continue to collect bills that were due before the account was inactivated.
When an account is closed, the customer cannot use any service. Closing an account cancels all of the charge offers and discount offers owned by the account.

A closed account is normally closed permanently, but you can reactivate it. Closing an account does not delete the account or its service login names and passwords from the BRM database. Because accounts are never deleted from the database, there is no time limit on when they can be reactivated.

When you close an account, all of the charge offers and discount offers owned by the account are canceled. When you re-activate the account, the offers must be repurchased.

Note:

You cannot delete accounts from a production BRM system.

You can customize how status changes are made. For example:

You can enable customers with an inactive account to pay a bill by using a Web application.
You can configure BRM to automatically inactivate or activate an account. You cannot automatically close an account or re-activate a closed account.
You can backdate account status changes to a date earlier than the current date.
You can schedule a status change for a future date.

About Service Status

Changing the status of an account also changes the status of all the account's services. Changing the status of a single service affects only that service.

When you inactivate an account, all the account's services are inactivated.
When you reactivate an inactive account, all the account's services that were inactivated when the account was inactivated are reactivated. Services that were inactivated independently of the account status are not reactivated.
When you close an account, all the account's services are closed.
When you reactivate a closed account, all the account's services that were closed when the account was closed are reactivated. Services that were manually inactivated (whose status was not changed when the account was closed) remain in the inactive state when the account is re-activated.
You can specify a date in the future on which the service status will change.
You can use service life cycles to add custom statuses. For example, you can add Dormant status to indicate a service that has not been used for a period of time.

About Charge Offer and Discount Offer Status

When creating an account or adding a bundle, you can change the status of each charge offer. For example, if using the offer requires hardware setup, you can inactivate the offer until setup is complete. The customer is not charged for the offer until it is activated.

Changing the status of an account also changes the status of all the account's charge offers and discount offers.

When you inactivate an account, all the account's charge offers and discount offers are inactivated.
When you reactivate an inactive account, you reactivate all charge offers and discount offers that were active when the account was active. Charge offers and discount offers that were inactive when the account was active remain inactive.
When you close an account, all the account's charge offers and discount offers are canceled.
When you reactivate a closed account, the account's charge offers and discount offers are not reactivated. To regain the canceled charge offers and discount offers, the account must repurchase them.

You cannot change the status of an offer after it has been purchased. However, you can change the start and end dates for offers to specify when balance impacts are recognized from the offer.

About Managing Purchased Offers

You can modify the offers that a customer owns in the following ways:

Change the quantity that the customer can own (for example, add minutes to a balance).
Change the validity dates (start and end dates) for purchase, recurring, and usage charges. Balance impacts are not recorded if the charges occur outside of the validity dates.
Cancel the offer. You can cancel individual charge offers and discount offers, or cancel all offers in a bundle at one time by canceling the bundle. You can cancel an offer immediately or backdate the cancellation. You can also set the cancellation to a future date. You can charge for offer cancellations by creating a cancel charge.
Configure bundle and package transitions. This enables you to define an offer upgrade path, and to enforce mutually exclusive offers.

You can configure several options for how to charge customers when canceling a charge offer or discount offer.

When Is Programming Required?

Most BRM features can be customized without any programming. For example, most product offerings, CSR-based account creation, and billing setup requires no programming to customize. The following customizations require some programming:

Creating services. If you offer a service that is not supported by default in BRM, such as a fax service, you must create a custom service to capture and rate fax-related events.
Modifying some BRM defaults. In some cases, you must modify policy source code to change BRM behavior. For example, to rate broadband access by the number of bytes downloaded rather than by connection time, you must edit source code.
Creating custom applications. Some BRM implementations can be greatly enhanced by creating simple applications that manipulate data in the BRM database. For example, you can write applications to do the following tasks:
- Alert customers that their free hours are almost used up.
- Search for customers who have late payments.
Customizing Billing Care. To change appearance and functionality, use the Billing Care SDK.
Customizing Customer Center. To change appearance and functionality, use the Customer Center SDK.
Supporting a legacy system. If you already have data stored in a database, you can write a Data Manager (DM) to provide an interface to that database.
Customizing event notification. You use event notification to set up processes to run automatically. For example, you can customize BRM to send an email message to a customer automatically when a credit limit is nearly expired.
Implementing advanced pricing features. Some pricing features (for example, product-level provisioning) require some programming for the initial setup.

About Customer Billing and Payment Information

You can manage the billing and payment information for each customer. Billing and payment information includes the following:

Payment method (for example, if the customer pays by credit card or check).
Credit card information.
Invoice information (for example, the mailing address and whether to deliver the invoice by email or postal mail).
The accounting type (balance forward or open item), which determines if bills are cumulative or not. See "About Accounting Types" for more information.
The customer's billing day of month and billing frequency. See "About Billing Cycles" for more information.
The customer's credit limit.