Customer care functionality is generally a component part of a full Billing and Customer Care product and includes full life-cycle management from customer acquisition to account management, subscriptions, disputes, adjustments, and customer inquiries.
Enterprise billing is generally billing carried out by organizations in a business-to-business environment, as distinguished from consumer billing where the end customer is an individual. Enterprise billing is often hallmarked by environments where change must be managed, complexity embraced and innovation and efficiency are required for competitive advantage.
Financial services billing is carried out by companies operating in the financial services sector, such as retail or investment banks, insurance companies or other such players. These companies tend to have specific billing requirements, but they operate in a market wherein billing has never been appropriately rationalized mainly because such organizations have grown their operations around products.
The media and entertainment sector includes both traditional and digital companies. This vertical is undergoing business model change at an unprecedented rate as companies increasingly shift to new, online strategies which make new demands on billing products.
MetraCare
MetraCare is the Customer Care module within the MetraNet billing product. MetraCare provides full life-cycle customer care from customer acquisition to account management, subscriptions, disputes, adjustments, and customer inquiries. MetraCare also offers One-Touch activation.
Released in April 2009, MetraNet 6.0 (PDF) is the latest version of the MetraNet product for billing, settlement and customer care. It enables organizations to adapt to rapidly evolving market conditions and to make change a competitive differentiator. This is critical for today’s enterprise which must thrive in a business climate where technological innovation, the harsh economic landscape, the demands of globalization, and issues of corporate social responsibility requires it to manage change at an unprecedented rate.
Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. The on-demand function may be handled internally to share licenses within a firm or by a third-party application service provider (ASP) sharing licenses between firms.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Service Oriented Architecture is an attempt to provide set of principles or governing concepts used during phases of systems development and integration in software. Such an architecture is supposed to package functionality as interoperable services within the context of various business domains involved. Several departments within a company or different organizations may integrate or use such services — software modules provided as a service — even if their respective client systems are substantially different. It is an attempt to develop yet another means for software module integration. Rather than defining an API, SOA defines the interface in terms of protocols and functionality. An endpoint is the entry point to such an SOA implementation.
Settlement is the process of calculating the compensation between any number of partners in a value chain utilizing any business model. Facilitating collaboration between parties, contractual agreements are enforced, targets are managed and disputes resolved efficiently to maintain relationships, ensure cash-flow and enable growth.
Transportation billing refers to the requirements and products available for billing by transportation service providers such as airport systems, mass transit and congestion charging systems, rail operators and others.
Wireless billing refers to the requirements and products for billing used by wireless network operators and wireless service providers, known as mobile in some geographies and cellular in others. These service include mobile voice, WiFi, WiMax and others.
Wireline billing refers to the requirements and products for billing used by fixed or wireline network operators and service providers offering voice and data service across all network technologies.