The Telecom Agent’s Complete Guide to Corrective Telecom Billing Errors
Operating as a telecom agent can be a lucrative path to achieving financial freedom and security through a diversified business model. Your IT consulting business can offer several services, from networking to cloud communications to security.
Yet, like any business owner will tell you, your day-to-day isn’t always a breeze. Selling services, even mission-critical ones like enterprise-grade business Internet can be an involved and lengthy process. You have to:
- Identify a qualified prospect for your portfolio of services
- Get a meeting with the right stakeholders at the prospective company
- Persuade the prospect of the need for these services
- Explain how you can deliver best-of-breed solutions as an unbiased advisor
- Collect quotes on services from various providers and carriers and organize them into a detailed proposal with timelines for deployment
- Present the case for each service deployment scenario and the pros and cons of each
- Secure agreement from the client to move forward with your chosen vendors and services, including a lengthy legal contract process between companies
- Onboard each vendor and their services with your new client and coordinate the deployment of them at each client location, all while keeping your client diligently informed and your providers on track to meet timelines
While this process above is involved, as a telecom agent, you should be able to take a step back after deployment, trust the ongoing services from your providers are being delivered and charged for correctly, and only need to answer the occasional service call and focus on acquiring new business, right?
Not quite. The most sensitive and contentious component of serving any client (and the part you’d like for your clients not to be actively thinking about and mulling over), invoicing, can be utterly fraught with errors from your chosen carrier.
Imagine you’ve onboarded a new business customer, get them to trust you and your judgment on Internet carrier selection, and a few months into your ongoing service, you learn all invoices sent to your customer have errors. They’re being charged for services they didn’t sign up for. What now? Well, it will inevitably fall to you as their telecom agent who procured their Internet services to resolve the billing errors.
What’s the Typical Telecom Billing Error Resolution Process?
You might think that while it’s not great they’ve been invoiced incorrectly, a simple email or five-minute phone call to the carrier billing department will fix this, right? After all, they’re a large company; shouldn’t they have the resources to resolve this?
Well, not exactly. In our experience as a business Internet provider for over two decades, APX Net typically sees the telecom billing error resolution process unfolding this way:
- Error Detection – The end customer discovers and identifies the error, assuming that they know enough to uncover the mistake and understand they’re being incorrectly charged.
- Error Reporting – The end customer reports the mistake to the telecom agent or directly to the Internet carrier.
- Carrier Contact Attempts – The telecom agent or end customer brings the error to the Internet carrier’s attention. However, this process takes multiple attempts. It’s not typically as straightforward as just sending one email or making one phone call and getting to a resolution. Reaching the carrier involves going through complicated support phone trees and emailing a general email distribution that goes back to a likely understaffed carrier billing department, which can take weeks or months to get back to you. For example, one of APX Net’s prospective clients was using a well-known carrier and had billing issues for at least five months with no resolution, which persists now.
- Carrier Error Confirmation – Once finally acknowledged by the carrier, the carrier must resolve the error.
- Carrier Follow-Up Contacts – The resolution of the error typically will drag on and require multiple follow-ups from the telecom agent over weeks and months yet again to resolve the issue.
- Carrier Resolves Error – Finally, the carrier will fix the invoice process, issue correct invoices going forward and credit the customer for the overpayment.
Often during this long and drawn-out process, the IT department or business owner at the end customer company will get frustrated and simply pay the incorrect invoices, not knowing what else to do as they can’t risk having their Internet services shut off, and hope the carrier eventually resolves the problem and issues a credit.
What Do Telecom Billing Errors Mean for Telecom Agents?
Now, these telecom billing errors ultimately mean that telecom agents will encounter these challenges in their business:
- Reputational Damage & Lost Future Revenue – End customers will complain about the carrier the agent sourced, damaging the agent’s reputation and confidence with the customer for future business after the contract term ends.
- Lost Time & Productivity – The end customer will make the error the agent’s problem to resolve. Even if the customer begins the process on their own initially, they’ll escalate it to the telecom agent since they’ll assume the agent will have better luck getting a hold of the carrier. The agent must spend time away from selling to handle billing trouble tickets and audit bills instead of winning new business. According to a study by the TM Forum, billing errors cost the telecom industry an estimated $50 billion per year.
Why Are Telecom Bills Confusing?
If you’re new in the industry as a telecom agent, telecom bills and invoices are notorious for being confusing. The complicated nature of the invoices is for a variety of reasons, including:
- Multiple Telecom Billing Systems – Telecom billing systems at carriers vary depending on the services the end customer purchases. Wireless Internet, fiber Internet, data and other services all have different billing systems. Suppose you’re sourcing your phone system from the same company that provides your Internet, for instance. In that case, you can be charged for multiple services from separate business units at the same company. Mergers and acquisitions can also impact this as billing systems are fragmented between newly synergized carriers.
- Variety of Telecom Billing Rates – There isn’t just one rate for telecom services. The various products have standalone rates, often impacted by bundling multiple services. If you source dedicated Internet access connectivity from the same carrier that is deploying an SD-WAN or SD-Internet device over the top of your locations, they may give you a discount, which is your “net effective rate” for services. This rate may be lower than the “base rate” for services. Additionally, service contracts can be for three years or more, so discounts and promotions run to ease your migration to a new carrier may no longer be in effect or even forgotten about by the carrier.
- Telecommunications Contract Terms on Charges & Discounts – Service discounts are often fixed in the contract term. However, monthly charges may not be fixed for the contract term. If the “base rate” of services from the carrier is increased at any point during the contract term, then the overall invoice is higher despite having discounts in place.
- Taxes and Regulatory Fees – Contracted fees for services often don’t include other telecom charges, such as taxes and regulatory fees from the telecom industry to the carrier and are frequently added to invoices and may not match the contracted amount. Since these fees aren’t often enumerated in contracts, determining whether they’re accurate or have “hidden” costs to pad a carrier’s margin can be difficult without industry knowledge.
What Are the Causes of Telecom Billing Errors?
So, let’s get down to the bottom of the primary causes of these rampant telecom billing errors. They include:
- Human Errors – At the top of our list are human errors, starting with poor communication between sales and operations during the hand off to billing. Errors can occur at any point in the process, including incorrect data provided by sales, mistakes in data entry and keystrokes, rate calculation, invoice generation and payment processing. Human errors usually happen because of a lack of training or processes to catch mistakes. These manifest in overcharges, undercharges, duplicate charges, incorrect taxes or wrong customer information.
- System Errors – System errors result from software bugs, hardware failures, network disruptions, data corruption or security breaches. This affects invoice accuracy and completeness of billing data. These show up as missing, delayed or erroneous charges on invoices.
- Contract Errors – A discrepancy, ambiguity, or change in the service agreement between the carrier and the end customer usually causes these errors. These errors affect terms, conditions, rates, discounts, or services’ add-on incentives. Contract errors can result in incorrect charges, contract breaches and end customer churn.
- Regulatory Errors – Regulatory errors affect taxes, fees, surcharges or tariffs that apply to the services. These errors can occur due to non-compliance with the various laws, rules and standards governing the telecom industry.
- Customer Errors – The end customers can cause errors depending on their requests or behaviors. Some telecom services are usage-based or consumption-based, after all, so this can impact their bill. There are situations where a customer may choose to alter information about their regular ongoing payment information in an online portal, like removing a credit card that was on file, resulting in a payment failure and subsequently resulting in payment late fees and possibly early disconnection penalties if a long-term contract is in place.
How Can Telecom Agents Prevent Telecom Billing Errors?
Telecom billing errors are a pervasive, industry-wide problem; according to Gartner, 80% of telecom bills contain errors. The reality is that the large carrier companies aren’t going to change their processes. They’re often enormous and slow-moving organizations that only need to resolve issues for substantial clients with hundreds or thousands of locations sourcing enterprise business Internet services from them. So, what should a telecom agent do?
Source your telecom services through APX Net to ensure your customers are invoiced correctly and never have to deal with a carrier again on billing issues. We have processes in place that guarantee a simple, accurate invoice is delivered to your customer every month. It all starts with a thorough review of the sales contract.
The same day an opportunity is brought to APX Net by our partners, we reach out to the client within 24 hours to set up a technical review of the requirements with their IT team. The goal is to confirm the order details, so it is processed accurately right out of the gate. As soon as the first invoice is generated, our client services team has a mandate to review over the phone or in a web meeting with our joint customer to answer any questions. We aim to show the customer this is a different experience than working with other past carriers from which they’ve sourced business Internet and data network services.
Then, on an ongoing monthly basis, our staff manually reviews every invoice sent to your end customers to ensure they’re accurate and error-free. If there is an issue with an invoice, we immediately make an adjustment, eliminating the need for chasing credits. You have to ask yourself as an agent, what do I recover in time and revenue by not having to deal with telecom billing issues ever again?
Ready to Get Back to Managing Your Business Instead of Your Providers?
The data networks experts at APX Net have got your telecom business clients covered with the APX Net Advantage:
- One Source – We’re your single source and point of contact for quoting, contracting, engineering, project management, customer service and invoicing.
- One Invoice – We streamline accounting with accurate, flat-rate billing and consolidated invoices for network services at all your clients’ business locations.
- All Locations – We specialize in connecting all your clients’ offices, branches, warehouses or plants, whether they’re in metro or remote areas.
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