Automating The Billing System Of Tomorrow

When it comes to managing invoices or paying bills, businesses in a variety of industries seek a solution that will be both accurate and efficient. PYMNTS sat down with Kirill Rechter, CEO of LogNet Billing, to discuss how automated billing solutions can benefit companies today as well as the services they hope to bring to market in the future.

PYMNTS: What problem does LogNet Systems solve and for whom?

KR: We founded our MaxBill product suite in 1996 with a broad vision to address any kind of billing solution for different services and verticals as well as various customer segments. From telecommunications to energy and gas, and even retail and wholesale, we are covering all that in one billing system. In the last 19, almost 20, years, it has proven itself as the right vision. We have had many installations of our solutions both in the retail segments and also in the business-to-business segment.

PYMNTS: Much of LogNet’s focus has been on the customer’s end users, but this has changed significantly in recent years. Where is the shift going right now?

KR: Our focus is shifting to medium-sized service providers, many of which deliver various telecommunications and utility services to retail segments or business segments. But our service providers continue to serve the end users.

PYMNTS: What are the defining characteristics of what LogNet is doing that sets it apart from others in the automated billing space?

KR: We are not just providing the functionality of creating bills, but we are overseeing the strategic challenges of each and every one of our customers and service providers. Our modern billing solution is aimed at reaching new targets, reaching new customer segments and turning billing into a competitive advantage. We do this by delivering full end-to-end solutions from CRM or the management and product catalog to build billing and automated processes. These processes then work to fully automate the revenue assurance and management that come with billing.

With our solution, service providers will not need to complete anything on their side because we deliver a full suite of modules, such as trouble ticketing, knowledge management, self-care and even workforce management. This provides our customers with a complete set of tools they can use to better compete within the market, while cutting costs and generating profits.

Outside of those main differentiators, we have conducted more than 70 different implementations of our solution and bring our experience and best practices from being in the market for almost 20 years. These best practices, which we call our process catalog, provide different verticals — whether it is telecommunications, gaming or utilities — with a set of processes on how to do things.

For example, if a customer is going through a change of tenancy, moving from one location to another, any process related to the task can be found in our catalog of best practices, which prevents the customer from having to start from zero. At the same time, we try to reduce the overall project time and the probability of failure, which can be high in the billing space, and keep both to a minimum. Our process can last anywhere from four months to eight months for medium-sized service providers, which is very fast in today’s market, including a migration from a legacy system.

PYMNTS: How would you describe the value proposition of LogNet?

KR: We provide a very competitive end-to-end billing product solution for any type of service. For services in today’s market, there may be many solutions, but the question is if the billing system will support the services of tomorrow. We have all seen how significantly this landscape has changed over the last 10 to 20 years, but our system is future-proof with all of its capabilities. From machine-to-machine to any other type of service, we have built several installations of a solution to fit the billing system needs. It is a true customer-centric system.

PYMNTS: What does LogNet have in the works looking ahead to the upcoming months or year?

KR: We are continuing to increase our portfolio of service providers where we see a great deal of opportunity. In the B2B area, we have seen many sophisticated telecommunication services related to security and mobile offerings, and we are working with several larger service providers in this area. There is also a big transformation happening in the utility service provider market with the growing use of smart meters. These companies are starting to behave more like telecommunications businesses because the smart meters act like machine-to-machine devices. Providers in the utility sector are expecting huge amounts of traffic, and they will have to create structures to support the increase in service tickets and offerings as well as introduce these new services to their customers to ensure loyalty.

We are also building out our portfolio of customers, especially in Central and Western Europe, and we are looking to expand in Asia and North America as well.