AT&T Billing and Payments Issues

So, by any chance are you a telecom company finding that you have "sub prime" customers? AT&T seems to think so: AT&T's market capitalisation went down nearly 5% as they reported that people were not paying their phone bills on time. One way of looking at this is that billing and payments management are notoriously difficult to manage well. That's why when analysts look to the core competencies of large carriers, they rarely look at the access technologies, they always point to the billing and payments management. That's why when you declare that you are not "on top of it", you get hammered. You get hammered for "not managing cash flow" in every industry. I've been following Telco as a space for quite a while now, and it has always bugged me that Telco's can't seem to use the billing moment to declare value delivered, not minutes consumed. Of course their are also some customers that should just not be allowed run up a bill.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact