Automated Telecom Billing Software and Provisioning System for IP Telephony

Business challenge

Our client is a leading Swiss provider of wholesale IP telephony services that reinforces business communications nationwide through their collaborative customer portal. To meet evolving demand for new services, the company decided to expand their portal with advanced telecom billing software to automate complex invoicing operations. To bring their idea to fruition, they chose to enlist the services of a seasoned technology partner who could complete the project efficiently, with the highest quality, and in a timely manner.

As demand for our client’s innovative services and solutions surged in the VoIP market, the company planned to broaden their range of offerings. Aside from implementing a billing platform telecom operators and other customers could benefit from, our client had a strategic long-term vision for building on their customer portal. The next step was to develop a dedicated provisioning system for automatic configuration of IP phones. Additionally, the customer portal itself required to implement the latest technologies, integrations with new solutions, and constant functionality enhancements.

With years of telecom expertise and successful software development in telecom billing, Intellias proved a great fit. Our cooperation, which started with building a billing application, grew into a many-year partnership resulting in winning outcomes and business expansion for our client.

Solution delivered

Intellias gathered a strong engineering team that quickly delved into the project, set up the software development process, and rolled out a fully functional billing product in just 10 months. Following this successful release, Intellias started supporting our client on many levels and on a constant basis.

Billing

Our team built telecom billing systems software for our client from the ground up, providing requirements development and analysis, UI/UX design, implementation, testing, and support services. The software we developed ensures automated billing management and eliminates inefficient and time-consuming manual procedures for generating, validating, and documenting invoices.

By adding highly customizable algorithms with support for different kinds of contracts (prepaid, postpaid, mixed), we not only simplified billing operations but minimized the risk of monetary losses and provided early warnings of possible misdemeanors with advanced fraud detection techniques.

We integrated our client’s telecom billing system with the user portal database and a third-party enterprise accounting platform. To cater to the growing needs of our client’s customers ─ often large corporations with many departments ─ we developed an Organization Unit feature that enables billing by department. This allowed our client to increase their level of service by providing for more flexible cooperation with customers.

Our engineers also supported the shutdown of our client’s billing application after the company was taken over by and merged with a European telecommunications corporation. We ensured a smooth data transition from our client’s application to the acquiring corporation’s billing system.

Provisioning

The next important milestone of the project was to provide automated configuration of Cisco, Snom, Aastra, and Panasonic IP phones through a dedicated system for provisioning of end plug and play devices using the DHCP protocol. Our team developed this system completely from scratch and brought it to production.

Our client’s provisioning solution automatically configures IP telephony systems, accelerating the setup of new devices for end users. With the help of security channels, all phones connected to the network are automatically configured by the server. This spares users the effort of setting up phones and minimizes operational costs otherwise needed for maintaining the technical support department.

The system is now supported on the client’s side, but we provide assistance and consulting to the product maintenance team as needed.

Customer portal

Through the years of our cooperation, we’ve worked on three generations of our client’s user portal, expanding it with new functionality and bringing it up to date with global technology trends. We started from enriching and upgrading our client’s existing customer portal and then went on to develop the next version, giving the portal a refreshed look and feel and increasing its usability.

Currently, our team is developing a brand-new edition of the portal application built on the latest technologies to keep the bar high for the system’s performance, reliability, and supportability. The application features a newly rebranded and user-friendly interface with a responsive design that can be viewed on any device. We’ve also significantly beefed up the portal’s security, reduced the server response time, and increased the system’s scalability.

Our client’s portal is a customer management system for administering IP telephony infrastructure. It serves users on several levels:

• Administrators and resellers use subscription management functionality to set up features available for each specific customer.
• Customers configure features to the most optimal settings.
• Features set up by customers are used by end devices, ensuring smooth communication experiences for end users.

Our team enriched the customer portal with a range of innovative features that enabled our client to stand out on the telecom market and win numerous enterprise customers. The following are two killer features that earned our client many new contracts:

• Number management

We created efficient centralized management of assigned phone numbers that considerably refined capabilities for searching for, editing, selling, and porting numbers in and out. The system consolidates the whole pool of distributed numbers in the portal and allows customers to flexibly manage their IP telephony networks. Customers can even book and obtain a series of similar numbers or numbers with specific digit patterns.

• Automatic call distribution (ACD)

An ACD feature that our engineers implemented helped our client take their business to the enterprise level and bring on board many sizeable organizations working with large call centers. Using the ACD feature, the system takes incoming calls and routes them to specific departments, groups, or agents within a call center based on distribution rules.

Other important portal functionality we developed and integrated includes:

• Virtual/hosted PBX voice switch
• IVR (interactive voice response)
• Call redirection and call forwarding
• Speed dial (short numbers and extensions)
• Call groups
• Voice mails
• Conference calls
• Announcements
• Reporting
• Fax system
• Call pickup
• Phone book

Business outcome

The Intellias team has supported our client since the dawn of their customer portal and has guided its development through three generations and several important milestones. In addition to building a telecom billing software solution and a provisioning system, we’ve extended the portal’s functionality with multiple handy features that have made our client’s services in demand and rapidly scaling. Relying on our advanced technology expertise, our client has seen companies of all sizes, including enterprises, turn into loyal customers.

As a reliable software engineering partner, we have helped our client propel their business to the national level, enter new markets, and gain widespread recognition as one of the country’s largest and most trusted IP telephony providers. Our client’s success resulted in the acquisition of the company by a pan-European telecommunications corporation. Today, Intellias continues to consistently provide innovative technology solutions that offer real value to both our client and their customers.