Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description v3.1

Transcription

1 Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description v3.1 Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 1

2 Copyright Brite:Bill Limited, 23 Windsor Place, Dublin 2. All rights reserved. All product names, company names and/or trademarks mentioned in this document remain the property of their respective owners. This document and any software delivered by Brite:Bill Limited ("Brite:Bill") and its affiliates is confidential to Brite:Bill and is provided by Brite:Bill on the strict understanding that no part of this document or any software delivered by Brite:Bill may be modified, translated, decompiled, disassembled, reproduced, reverse engineered, used or transmitted by the recipient in any form without the prior written consent of Brite:Bill. Brite:Bill shall have no liability whatsoever in relation to this document or any software delivered by Brite:Bill and shall not be liable for any loss, expense, damage or claim arising out of the advice or statements made or omitted in this document. Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 2

3 Contents Contents Introduction Feature overview Core platform features Web channel features Mobile channel features Paper channel features API channel features Platform architecture and capabilities Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 3

4 Introduction The Brite:Bill Consumer Bill Presentment platform is a bill and invoice presentment and payments platform designed to provide a lightweight, flexible and robust solution for telecommunications companies, energy companies and billing aggregators. The solution provides an effective bill presentment service and greatly enhances customer engagement while driving keys metrics such as higher propensity to pay, lower cost to serve and increased customer retention. Brite:Bill licenses two main products for bill presentment: 1 Consumer Bill Presentment Platform 2 Corporate Bill Analyzer 1 These share the same core platform with UI features, capabilities and middleware. The products then add specific features of Consumer or Corporate. Finally channels define what the output channels for the solution are. These are web, mobile, print and API. Figure 1: Overview of the Brite:Bill Bill Presentment Platform 1 For more information on the Corporate Bill Analyzer, including hierarchy management, OLAP reporting cubes, custom report creation and corporate dashboard presentment, please see the Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description document. Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 4

5 Feature overview The Brite:Bill Consumer Bill Presentment Platform supports bill presentment and payment. This is enhanced by a high value end user focused feature set, with strong emphasis on user experience, notifications, user engagement and personalization. The Consumer platform is designed to serve the Consumer, SOHO and small SME user base, with the Corporate product version designed for larger, hierarchical corporates. Core platform features The Brite:Bill Consumer Bill Presentment Platform ships with the following features that are supported across all channels, and both consumer and corporate products. Bill ingest and presentment The platform ships with a common set of bill ingest and processing workflows that provide for high quality presentment across all channels. The same pattern for integration, ingest and processing of billed and unbilled data is employed regardless of the final output format. These workflows involve parsing the billing data, transformation of that data to an XML schema defined bill format, semantic and decisioning analysis, and finally notifications and output. Usage analytics and reporting A key feature set that is supported by the platform is analytics and reporting on usage. The platform ships with support for a fully customizable reporting framework that may be used to give the end user better insight into bills and invoices. This framework is coupled with a high quality set of HTML5-, print- and smartphone-ready graphical report templates that may be deployed on the printed bill, HTML bill view, call usage views, dashboard and dedicated usage analysis pages. Consumer reports that ship out of the box are: Historical bill costs Billed and real-time usage report showing usage per call type and against bundle allocations Breakdown of bill costs per product, charge type and call type. Platform level analytics and reporting The platform also ships with the capability to report on the broader platform-wide billing data set. This allows for reporting on full bill runs and on historical billing data sets for reconciliation, audit and revenue recognition processes, as part of billing operations such as bill run approval. Bill consolidation The platform supports bill consolidation to present a single invoice with data from multiple billing systems. This may be useful in offering new packages (tri or quad play) and bundles and in presenting a single invoice to the customer. Integration for invoice creation and reporting into the billing and financial system are supported by well-defined APIs. Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 5

6 Personalization The platform has strong support for personalization of dashboard, bill and invoice views. All incoming bill data sets are mapped to a XML schema-defined format on import. The platform then uses this format to drive a series of decision rule sets that effect both a semantic check of the imported data and to derive facts about the customer and bill that may be used to insert personalized messaging. This can be done on the printed bill, HTML bill, HTML dashboard views and on smartphone applications. It can be used to drive cross-sell or up-sell of services, to better explain usage and charges to the user or to explain new packages or key events such as the first bill. Personalization may be enabled for bill, real-time billing and user profile management features to help address real-time and non real-time use cases. Operational dashboard The platform provides a comprehensive dashboard for the monitoring and management of bill runs. This provides the tools and analytics to billing operations and other stakeholders, such as finance and IT, to preview bill run status prior to approval of the bill run for release. The operational dashboard has the following key features: Real-time monitoring of bill runs shows invoices processed, failures and bill run speed. Preview of bill runs shows key bill run metrics with drill down into individual batches and downloadable reports showing key statistics, result codes and failure reasons for each individual invoice. Reporting for reconciliation and revenue assurance reports on the entire bill run data set may be tallied against billing system reports and other BI metrics (such as amount billed per product line) to ensure end-to-end financial visibility prior to release approval. Bill run approval allows the review and approval of the bill run. On approval the associated bills are released to the electronic channels, print channel streams are consolidated and sent for print and end user notification processes are commenced. If a bill run is rejected it may be re-run upon remediation of the issue. Bill run automated failure allows operational settings for what level a batch is deemed to have failed. If more than a given percentage or number of bills fail the bill run is automatically cancelled Bill run remediation this allows for batches and individual bills to be removed or reprocessed prior to bill run approval. This facilitates the resolution of small issues without the need for a full re-run of the bill run. Personalization management The platform allows for the management of personalization rules across all channels, providing the ability to create and change the rules behind personalization in real-time. A web-based management tool allows for creation, editing, enabling and disabling of rules. These rules may then drive personalized messaging on one or more channels. The tools are designed to allow for the intuitive creation of rules without specialist technical knowledge, which may be tested on staging prior to rollout to production instances. Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 6

7 Web channel features The web channel is rendered in HTML5 to a responsive design supporting the following features: Bill/Invoice presentment The platform provides components to support electronic bill and invoice presentment. This includes dashboard and bill listing views, an HTML5 view, standard bill view (PDF or AFP), call detail record views and configurable reporting/analytics on usage, cost and bill breakdown. The views presented to the end user are personalized with support for messaging and images that are tailored to the individual consumer and designed to address common billing issues such as first bill, pro-ration, bill shock and end-of-contract. Real-time usage The platform supports a real-time usage presentment feature that allows the user to see usage to date since their last bill. This may be real-time or valid up to a given time and provides a view of usage across all call or usage types with graphical reporting on in-bundle and out-of-bundle usage. This allows strong user engagement with web and mobile applications and is the ideal place for the up-sell and cross-sell of new bundles and products as well as pre-emptive care messaging. Real-time bill presentment supports both summary views of usage and detailed call detail record listings Real-time usage can be viewed by the account owner, for all users linked to their account End users who are not the billing account owner but use a device on the billing account, may activate their account and view their real-time usage via the Web and Mobile channel. Bill/Invoice payment The platform ships with full support for payment workflows facilitating payment via integration with one or more payments processors; either via integration with a backend payments gateway or a redirect to a payment s issuer as per a 3D secure workflow. Notifications The platform has a built-in notifications engine feature set that allows the user to opt into bill received and bill due events, select what is sent in the payload and choose notification channels ( and SMS). The notification payload may be customized for each segment and brand. Bill consolidation The Brite:Bill platform offers the ability to merge billing data from multiple billing engines, in order to create a new consolidated invoice which may then be fed back into the General Ledger and Accounts Receivable. This may be used to present bills for quad play and other packages without upgrading legacy billing systems. Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 7

8 Aggregated views The platform has been designed to provide the user with an aggregated view of all bills and invoices allowing them to view and manage all their relationships with a biller or billers from a single application. Self-care features The Brite:Bill platform ships with support for a wide range of self-care features to allow the user to self-manage, resulting in reduced call centre traffic. These features include the display and management of user profile information (name, addresses, sex, addresses, contact mobile number), subscription, product and package information, Direct Debit information, notification settings, bill payment history and sharing management. Administration and customer management The platform ships with a separate administration application for the management of end users and customer service representatives. This supports a CSR view of the customer with bill views, reporting/analytics and self-care profile overview. The CSR view supports customer impersonation to provide a replica view for customer care of the user experience, with access to both the online and printed view of the invoice. This helps reduce confusion and facilitate quicker resolution of issues, reducing call duration times. Mobile channel features Brite:Bill ships with strong support for the mobile channel. Account activation, management and authentication features are optimized for a mobile device while both a mobile browser based app and a native app are fully supported for the features outlined in the API channel section. Brite:Bill provide a template mobile application using a responsive HTML5 design to deliver to tablet, desktop and mobile devices. This may be restyled and customized with minimal effort to provide a custom mobile application that s fully integrated with Brite:Bill for billed and real-time usage presentment and self-care features. Smartphone native app support The platform ships with a fully featured API that has functional primitives for all platform features and supports the OAuth V2 authentication standard. This can be used for smartphone app development. Brite:Bill also ships with template applications that may be branded and styled and are licensed separately. See the API channel section below for an overview of the API primitives and capabilities. Browser-based app support The Brite:Bill platform supports a browser-based mobile application out of the box. All features of the platform are HTML5 compatible and have been designed to resize automatically for mobile devices. Features may be optimized for devices such as carousel bill listings, pinch mode in bill views and varying usage reports optimized by device. Paper channel features The platform paper channel has been built to utilize the best in open standard print and web technologies facilitating ease of creation, management, ongoing editing and operational Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 8

9 monitoring of changes. The platform supports design-time tools for print design and layout, and business rule creation and management. The runtime utilizes an open source, highly scalable middleware architecture that is based around an XML and Java technology stack. The Brite:Bill core platform is enhanced with the following paper channel features: Printed bill output Brite:Bill allows for the generation of PDF and AFP output formats using the Brite:Bill XML bill format with an Apache FOP XSLT engine to generate these. The XSLT template provides for the bill layout, content and structure using CMS-based content, business rules (either imported or inferred using Brite:Bill personalization) and the bill XML data to generate a personalized, high quality printed bill output to be sent to the print stream or used for online presentment. This output stream can also concatenate individual AFP files into a single file for print processing. Bill design Brite:Bill allows the customer to design their bill and letter templates using best of breed design tools. This allows for InfoPrint design using the Adobe InDesign tool for the creation of template designs. From a template the final bill layout may be created and modified with a publish review cycle. Bill layout editing using standard web technologies The detailed layout and management of content is driven using standard web XSLT. This may be done using any XSLT toolset but the Altova XSLT editor is recommended for the purpose of rapid creation of the final layout. Using this tool the initial design template is enriched with business rules and content, sample bill XML is loaded, and example bill PDFs and AFPs are generated and reviewed. Bill content creation and management using Web CMS Bill content imagery and copy may be fully managed using any standard CMS. Using the CMS create/edit/review capability to allow for the creation of bill content and ongoing editing of that content. Typical content review cycles may be supported using the CMS standard feature set. The CMS may be easily integrated using the standard CMS API or via simple HTTP URLs. Content is loaded on the fly by both the design-time and runtime tools. Business rules support The business rules required to drive the logic for the creation of printed bill output may be defined and managed in a separate rules engine (the same component is used for personalization). These rules access data that is extracted from the bill XML on ingest using XPath and enforce business logic checks to infer decisions about the user or the bill. Those decisions are carried along with the bill XML into the bill generation process and are used to define the output bill format and content. The rules may be easily edited and created allowing for effective separation of business logic from the final bill formatting and content. API channel features The Brite:Bill platform ships with a full REST API that allows for smartphone and third party application developers to access a full set of functional primitives for the presentment and Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 9

10 analytics of billed and unbilled usage. This API has primitives to support the following features: OAuth V2 authentication Full bill data set including call records Billed usage User profile and subscription information Reports and analytics Personalization decisions Unbilled usage User provisioning and management All data is returned in a well-defined JSON format that is suitable for smartphone and other client application development. Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 10

11 Platform architecture and capabilities The Brite:Bill platform has been built upon a base of proven, open source technologies to provide strong support for open standards, non-proprietary tooling and a flexible extensible architecture. Figure 2: Brite:Bill Consumer Bill Presentment Platform architecture Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 11

12 The Brite:Bill Consumer Presentment platform has the following key capabilities of note: Customisable HTML5 standard widgetized feature set The platform is shipped with a feature set that may be deployed either standalone or in a new or existing external portal. Dashboard, bill listing, bill views, payments, analytics and other views are shipped as responsive HTML5 compatible widgets that may be deployed into external web portals as a lightweight JavaScript & JQuery clientside layer. The platform user interface has been built with best in class user experience and web standards in mind. The look and feel is extremely flexible and open to deployment to meet third party UI designs using CSS, HTML5 templates and configuration. Fully headless architecture The web and mobile channels are delivered based entirely on the platform s well-defined API, available as JSON objects over the REST protocol. This allows for the full functional set of the platform to be utilized via standardized API calls for using Brite:Bill template UI widgets or for the development of a fully customized user interface. This gives seamless support of the mobile channel and 3 rd party applications. Single sign-on enabled The platform may be easily configured for single sign-on (SSO), shipping with support for OpenId, OAuth, SAML and custom protocols to support SSO via existing and third party identity providers. The platform supports the OAuth V2 standard out of the box. This is a popular standard for SSO via social networks and identity provider platforms, and is the emerging smartphone application authentication standard. Light-touch integration The Brite:Bill platform has key strengths in integrating with billing and other invoicing systems with a focus on aggregating bills from a variety of systems ensuring integration may be primarily loosely coupled. The product has features to allow for the retrieval and mapping of XML, PDF, AFP, ASCII delimited and other document formats from billing systems with little or no custom development. This is supported by open source and Brite:Bill-developed ETL mapping technology, a strong XML data model and rigorous semantic checking coupled with highly scalable billing data transport options from SFTP to SOAP. This approach allows for the rapid integration of the product with billing systems with little to no impact on the billing system infrastructure in very short timeframes. Highly scalable, lightweight architecture The Brite:Bill product has been built to run on an open source enterprise technology stack. It is deployed on three tiers: A lightweight web tier An open source integration tier A persistence tier that has been built for major scale. Each tier may be readily scaled with some key design approaches to ensure a strongly scalable architecture that may grow to web scale, without the requirement for an expensive commercial enterprise technology stack. Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 12

13 Cloud optimized Brite:Bill may be deployed within the Enterprise on any standard hardware and operating systems, and may also be deployed on a managed cloud basis. The platform has architectural features that are optimized for standard commercial private and public cloud services. These include the utilization of managed databases, load balancing, highly scalable and cost effective storage pools, auto-scaling at all tiers and multi-region availability and disaster recovery. Multi channel enabled The platform ships with a series of product components that may be deployed standalone, are fully HTML5 compatible, support the print and mobile channels and may also be run in REST API mode to facilitate rapid mobile application development. Analytics and reporting The platform supports a wide variety of out of the box reports for campaign management, billing operational and financial reconciliation purposes. This provides a view of failed ingests, billing totals across billing runs by products, services and usage statistics, by channel with and with deeper analytics for key events such as bill view and bill payment. The reporting and analytics features are supported by the use of a separate reporting data store. This allows for real-time reporting and analytics (to feed decisioning and personalization) without any impact on the main data store. The report data store is fed by an extract transform load (ETL) process that may be scheduled or kicked off as an event. The report data store and associated ETL process may be fully customized to feed the specific requirements of the solution. Monitoring Monitoring and management functions allow for monitoring of platform statistics and health metrics, and also for management operations such as the re-run of billing cycles and management of end-user accounts. Localization, accessibility and audit The platform is fully localized and multi brand capable across all channels. It is built for rich internet application accessibility (WAI-ARIA compliant) and supports a full and separate audit trail of all transactional activity. Audit is a key tool for admin and CSR staff in troubleshooting and tracking end user problems. Defense in depth The platform has been designed to provide for secure defense in depth. At each tier best practices, compatible with the OWASP top ten recommendations (see are employed to provide a robust and secure solution. This includes encryption in storage and in transit, coverage for all known web vulnerabilities and a tiered architecture that locks down access to user data. Brite:Consumer Bill Presentment Platform Product Description 13