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EBPP also enables customers to pay bills electronically, access their account information and schedule automatic payments.

Moreover, deploying an EBPP system is the first step toward providing a more comprehensive business solution using a fully self-service driven, Web-based customer-care model. Doing so helps service providers remain competitive, customer-centric and cost efficient. Web self-service provides faster, better customer care by offering a series of customer-centric features including:
• All of the components of today's EBPP applications
• Complete online support for searchable product catalogs
• Ordering and checking status of products and services
• Adding and updating account information
• Problem initiation and resolution

Cost Savings, Revenue Generation
Potentially, EBPP can save business billions of dollars. Paper-based billing costs as much as $2 per residential customer per month, and can be as high as hundreds of dollars for corporate customers. With some estimates for producing and processing electronic bills hovering at a mere 40 cents, service providers are deploying EBPP to reduce costs as well as remaining competitive; otherwise, they will spend capital on paper-based billing while their competitors focus resources on product delivery and customer-retention strategies.

More important than OPEX savings alone is the ability to use EBPP to generate revenue. While EBPP empowers customers toward self-care, it also provides the ability for service providers to deliver personalized marketing message to the customer. Based on the content of the electronic bill (such as geographic location, services purchased, total charges) a service provider can alter the look of the online bill and include targeted messages or advertising. This is a compelling driver for using this technology to enhance personalization of the customer interaction and to generate additional revenue for service providers.

While empowering customers with control over their account information is essential for widespread EBPP acceptance, EBPP systems provide other benefits that allow customers to:
• Organize how they receive, store and pay bills, including automatic payment scheduling
• Extract billing data and load the data into other software to study usage patterns and track costs
• Validate payment with an electronic audit trail

Because of the analytical information available through EBPP, providers can either provide EBPP as a value-added service for commercial customers or sell it as a new service.

Service Models

Biller Direct

The biller-direct model establishes electronic billing capabilities on a service provider's own Web site and provides customers with their billing information and bill-payment capabilities directly via the Web. This model strengthens service provider's relationships with customers and maintains control over its customer information. This model is simple to manage and provides strong branding opportunities. However, it can face limited market acceptance because it forces customers to access multiple sites to pay various bills.

Consolidator
The consolidator model relies on a central consolidator site to present charges from multiple billers and provides customers with a single site for viewing and paying bills. This model has two subsets: thick and thin consolidation.

Thick Consolidator: In the thick-consolidator model, service providers provide both summary and detailed customer-billing information to the consolidator. By doing so, service providers give up control over an important, recurring customer interaction and surrender valuable detailed customer information. This model will also face challenges to market acceptance based on limited acceptance of definitive standards for posting-billing details.

Thin Consolidator: Service providers using the thin-consolidator model only provide consolidators with a customer's summary billing information. The thin model safeguards detailed customer data, but customers may experience inconsistent customer care because the consolidator's Web site may look different than the service provider's site. This model, which has seen preliminary adoption of standards for posting information, stands the best chance for widespread EBPP market acceptance.

A hybrid model can occur when the service provider offer much more than simply telecom service. One UK-based company allows customers to purchase telecom services, books, wine, travel services, cars, and manage a private-labeled credit card account form a single Web site.

Regardless of the model service providers choose, the key elements they should look for in an EBPP system are:
• Data extraction and storage, which allows providers to extract data from billing records and store it for bill presentment
• Composition/content reformatting that enables providers to generate personalized electronic bills that contain targeted marketing information
• Management and tracking that allows service providers to track logon time, bill-retrieval history and other information for targeted marketing
• CSR information integration that provides CSRs with the most updated version of the electronic bill and the customer's most recent retrieval activity in case a customer calls with an inquiry
• Consolidator integration that enables providers to deliver billing information to consolidators using defined standards

Part Of The Web Self-Care Strategy

In addition to delivering improved customer service and reducing costs, an EBPP system with these features enables service providers to become more competitive in the market. EBPP takes another step toward providing Web self-care that can boost customer satisfaction and reduce churn. Those service providers that provide customers with this type of empowerment will enjoy the most market success. An effective Web self-care strategy includes these capabilities:
• EBPP
• Self-care that enables customers to perform on-demand customer care for such actions as reviewing new product information, pursuing self diagnostics, reporting trouble and changing account details
• Self-ordering that allows customers to order new products at their convenience
• Self-provisioning that allows service providers to automatically link a customer's order to the backend systems which then complete the provisioning for the order
• Personalization that enables service providers to deliver personalized marketing messages during a customer's transaction to ensure a targeted selling experience
• Guided selling that allows service providers to guide customers toward purchasing the right products that suit their needs

To deliver this level of Web self-care, service providers will need a convergent customer-care and billing system with an architecture that can support these functions. The architecture must have:
• Extensible application programming interfaces (APIs) or EAI connectors that enable tight integration between the customer-care and billing engine and a service provider's legacy or new customer relationship management (CRM) system
• Customer-centric workflow capabilities integrated with billing applications to facilitate a single view of a service provider's customers, products and network
• Real-time capabilities that will better handle Web-based applications in an e-care environment
• A rules-based engine that allows service providers to implement new marketing strategies based on information gleaned from customer interactions on the site faster than with a table-driven system
• High availability to ensure that customers can access their account information 24 hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of system failures
• The scalability to handles hundreds of millions of inquires and transaction per day

Today's communications customer has become increasingly Web savvy and consequently more demanding about instant access to account information and flexible customer-care options. To retain customers, service providers will need to deploy EBPP systems that give customers more timely access and increased control over billing information. At the same time, these systems will lay the groundwork for offering Web self-care that will reduce costs, generate revenue, empower customers and make service providers more competitive.