Collection System

Introduction

The collection system is a covering all the requirements telecom operators for the management of debt and owning customers. The functionality supported could cover the needs of all the companies (e.g. utilities or services) that use the same model, where a bill is produced periodically and sent to the customers.
The purpose of the system is to impose and support a collecting process, to improve the communication with the customers and the image of the company. On the other hand it supports the measurement of the effectiveness of the collecting process and the identification of any possible bottlenecks.

The features of the system

The collections system is very flexible and can be parameterized according to the collection policy used by the company. 
The system typically accepts input from a number of source systems, the billing system of the company, the ERP and the Customer Care system.

The typical steps of the process support include:

• The split of the owning customers in groups depending on the collecting policy, the customer profile and the amount of debt
• The definition of different groups of collectors
• Automatic or manual distribution of customers to collector groups.
• The definition of a workflow for the customer and the assignment of customers to collector groups. There it is defined the time each customer is handled by a group, which and when specific actions (e.g. calls, sending of a letter) should be performed for a customer and how each actions modify the status of the customer.
• Support of the calendar of collector actions.
• Possibility of automatic update of customer transactions from the billing or ERP
• Integration with other system for the automation of batch process for the sending of SMS, letters, suspension of customers, etc.
• Risk review and customer profile review.

System Architecture

As previously mentioned, the system communicates with the other systems of the organization (billing, ERP, customer care, etc.) and extracts information about the customer profile as well as customer debt.

The system consists of the following modules:

• Administration and customization sub-system, when different parameters can be set by the administrators
• Transaction, communication and action sub-system, where the collectors record all the communication and actions with the customers.
• Customer distribution sub-system, where the distribution of customers to collectors is performed
• Reporting sub-system, where different reports are produced
• External integration sub-system, where the communication with external sub-systems is defined and performed.

The system is implemented using a three-tier architecture, using J2EE technology, and the Oracle database.