Setting Up A Robust Wisp Billing System
Running an ISP is no easy task. There are several duties that need to be attended to. Besides providing service to your customers, you must be able to manage billing them, monitor your network services status, keep track of issues that arise, and much more. This can be a huge headache with just a few customers, let alone hundreds or even thousands!
The first thing you need to keep track of, and probably the most exciting to you as a business owner, is billing. Billing systems vary far and wide, and there are several solutions out there from manually entering credit card information for every customer, to fully automatic billing that you only need to monitor from month to month. Whatever system you use, you should consider that you need to have allowances for pro-rating, keeping track of different billing plans, keep track of past-due customers, etc.
Invoicing customers is another area where you will need a solution. Paper invoicing or email invoicing should be used. After all, your customers can’t pay you if they don’t know what they owe!
Another thing to consider is your equipment. If you are running and ISP, and especially a WISP (Wireless ISP), you may have equipment that is installed in your users homes. Do they buy this equipment? Is it on loan or lease? Keeping track of your assets is important. Your ISP business needs to keep track of where it’s equipment is, who is renting, and who owns there own equipment. Adding lease or loan payments to the bill each month is a necessity.
When you’re ready to accept payments, you will need a merchant account. Authorize.net and Verisign are two of the more popular credit card processors. If you are looking for an all-in-one solution, make sure that it integrates with one of these systems. You will need to pay fees for each credit card transaction, so if you can use a system that allows customers to pay by electronic check.
Do you offer incentives to customers who refer their friends and neighbors? Yet another system needs to be in place to handle these arrangements. Credits need to be easily added to user accounts and applied over various ranges.
Whatever system you use, it should be easy to manage your customers. Searching through messy filesystems trying to come up with customer data is a good way to increase your stress and lose your hair! Use a customer management system that is quick and easy and allows you to look up customers when you need to, without waits, searching through files, or worse - opening up your filing cabinet!
One thing that many customers complain about is installation. Even large ISPs often give huge windows for their installers. Although a window is unavoidable, you need to be able to tack down times and schedule installations according to your customer’s needs. A system to keep track of available install dates and assign installers to jobs is a must. This same system should be able to be used to schedule service calls.
Once you’ve got everything up and running smoothly, you need to be able to monitor your network. This should be done through a ticketing system. Tickets allows customers to file for help with a problem or report an outage. Each ticket comes into your support center and can be assigned a priority and given to the appropriate party to resolve. Tracking tickets and staying on top of response times is important to maintain customer satisfaction.
You should also be able to pull up reports on user accounts, services, and bandwidth usage. Find out who is hogging all your bandwidth and exceeding their limits. This will allow you to easily see who needs to have their accounts upgraded. You should also be able to run service-based reports. You need to be able to see what customers are signed up for what services, and how much money you should be receiving monthly.
Running and ISP is no walk in the park, but with a complete WISP billing software system, you should be running smoothly in no time. When shopping around, make sure that the software package you choose includes at least what was discussed in this article. With a little bit of research, you can find a system that is robust enough to meet your needs.
PowerCode offers robust http://www.powercode.com/powernoc_billing_more.php
Tags: authorize net, automatic billing, billing plans, billing system, billing systems, business owner, credit card processors, credit card transaction, easy task, electronic check, email, even thousands, far and wide, invoicing, isp business, keeping track, loan payments, verisign, wireless isp, wisp
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