Telecom Billing Update

 

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As consumers, we are well-aware of the importance of customer portals for accessing our accounts with the companies with which we do business. As a telecom service provider or reseller, your job is to provider your customers with the ultimate portal user experience, ensuring their entrée into your internal system to securely view their personal or sensitive data (i.e., data usage, billing and service management) as well as general account notifications. Yet, beyond these important considerations, the customer portal plays another much larger role within organizations.The customer portal is the ideal way for organizations to demonstrate their business value to customers, as well as to portray just how easy it is to do business with them. At the end of the day, customers are generally looking to see if businesses can operate in a way that is most convenient to them. As such, your customer portal should speak to your end users’ primary needs and be driven by their requirements.

Ask yourself, for example, if your portal is truly mobile-centric, presenting all data in a single and easily digestible view, or, instead, if it is headache-inducing for the mobile user. Does your portal allow users to easily review and pay invoices online, look at usage details, edit user information, add and change location data, and enable them make purchases through the portal (e.g., add or upgrade their service package)? Does your portal offer a secure login? All of this functionality should be there—and it should be at the fingertips of the end users, not just the portal administrators.

Another important consideration is downtime. Does your portal tend to go down often, keeping customers in the dark about their account details when they may need them most? Consider what happened to Verizon when its online portal went down last September, caused by a glitch during an upgrading process. Some customers were unable to access account details and others weren’t able to pay their bills on time. The fiasco resulted in the company having to refund customers whose bills were due during the portal downtime.

But excellent functionality only makes up one-half of an optimally performing customer portal. The other half involves branding. A well-designed, branded portal helps cultivate and bolster brand awareness. On the other hand, it can also tear a company’s brand image down, as evidenced by Verizon’s mishap. Customers took to Twitter to negatively blast the company by creating a #Verizonfail hashtag, where some users reported having no service for up to 16 hours with no estimate on when their account would be available again.

The customer portal should be the least of your worries as a telecom reseller. We believe that by freeing yourself from the confines of your upstream carrier’s processes, including its customer portal, you can better and more personally assure your customers that you are diligently working to meet their needs. After all, how can you demonstrate your business value to customers if you’re not in control of your own customer portal? If you agree that it’s time to take matters back into your own hands, click here.