Why Do Carriers Need Convergent Charging?

Convergent charging helps telecom businesses reduce wastage in managing and billing customers. These revenue wastages are caused by customers not being charged in real-time and the extra time to prepare different invoices.

Convergent Charging

Telecom businesses are constantly evolving the way they charge customers. These methods focus on improving customer experience while growing revenue.

Many methods have been developed for charging customers. They include prepaid, postpaid, and most recently, convergent billing.

In this article, we'll discuss what convergent billing means and why every telecommunications carrier out there needs to implement it in their business.

What Is Convergent Charging?

Convergent charging is the act of billing all of a customer's service usage as a single invoice.

Many telecom companies offer a diverse range of services - data, voice, prepaid, and postpaid telecom services. To properly serve the different segments of their customer base, many have developed flexible service bundles that people can use to suit their particular needs.

If a telecom business is not charging their customers with the convergent method, they have to send their users several invoices and so will have trouble keeping up with all the records. 

Customers themselves may not understand how they're being charged. Studying many invoices for many services from the same company is not a pleasant customer experience.

As a result, telecom carriers have moved towards convergent billing, where they can easily charge their customers in real-time for all the services they use. 

Reasons Carriers Should Adopt Convergent Charging

1.   To Improve Customer Experience

Convergent billing improves customer experience exponentially. A customer who is billed with the convergent method can easily see at a glance how many services he has used and how much he has paid or has to pay for them. 

Convergent billing also makes the telecom carrier more transparent and trustworthy.

2.   To Easily Gather Customer Data and Offer More Streamlined Services

By charging customers with the convergent method, telecom companies find it easy to gather data on how customers use their services. They can intuit what the customers need and offer those services before users ask. 

Also, there will be no need to pay for extra hours to compile customer data for analysis. Convergent billing tools gather and store data automatically.

3. To Reduce Wastage and Increase Revenue

Convergent charging helps telecom businesses reduce wastage in managing and billing customers. These revenue wastages are caused by customers not being charged in real-time and the extra time to prepare different invoices. 

Convergent billing helps companies charge users in real-time and update account balance records as required.

4.  To Create a Centralized Database of Customer Records

Businesses have a centralized database of all customers that is updated automatically and in real-time when using a convergent charging system. They quickly pull up vital records. Convergent billing makes data analysis simple for telecom carriers.

5.  To Create a Better Customer Support Experience

Convergent charging helps telecom companies to create a better customer support experience for customers. 

Since convergent charging enables companies to automatically have the complete history of a customer's usage in one place, there is no need to update records manually. AI can be implemented to guide customers through the support experience.

Telgoo5 has many years of experience providing converter billing solutions to telecom carriers. Reach out to Telgoo5 today for a free quote.

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