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Telecom Billing - Customer Acquisition

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A customer is a "legal entity" (that can be either an individual or a company) that takes the products and services offered by the service provider and responsible for paying the bills. In a residential billing scenario, a customer might be a single householder. In a business billing scenario, a customer might be a corporation.

Customer Acquisition Process:

Customer Acquisition is the process of identifying, attracting and retaining potentially profitable customers. This is handled using a system called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which is one of the important business support system (BSS).

A CRM system would always be connected with various systems including Billing System and feeds customer personal data, product and service information to the billing system.

A customer who is purchasing the products & services needs to be activated in the system and for this various details about the customer are required:

Once the customer is acquired, it is required to manage and retain the customer which involves:

Customer Life Cycle

A typical customer life cycle is shown below in the following diagram:

Customer Life Cycle

All the phases comprising a customer life are briefed here:

One a given date, total number of active customers in the system are called customer base. Adding a customer into the system, terminating a customer from the system, I mean customer addition and deletion in the customer base is called customer churn.

Customer Types:

Typically there are following types of customers in today's telecom market:

What is next?

Now we have customers in out billing system along with products and services. Customer start utlizing all the products and service bought and start generating national and international, data and voice calls. Which will be rated and billed by the billing system and I will explain those processes in coming chapters.


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