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For information on tracking other types of non-traditional Services, please review our article on Tracking non-traditional Services.
Here are some items to consider:
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No matter what method your Organization does for tracking Service Features, if there are plans to Bill, some form of Charge Catalogs will be needed to manage the Charges.
It is strongly encouraged to create new Charge Catalogs to represent the Service Feature fees so that they can be changed and updated independently from other Services to ensure clean billing.
Note: To show an item on a Bill, an item it must be Active and Assigned to an Owner. Services will Services will not appear on a Bill until they have been activated and assigned an Ownerand assigned to an Owner, and as such, any Service Features on the Service will also not appear.
UDFs
Through the use of Using User-Defined Fields, your Organization can set up any number of fields desired for the Service Features.
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When creating these UDFs to represent a feature, PCR recommends using the Checkbox field type to indicate if the feature is present on the Service. These UDFs can be associated with one or more different Services Catalogs, so Users do not need to create separate UDFs for Voicemail for a Business Line and for a Cellular Phone.
Examples
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It takes additional lookups to see what types of Service Features might be available for any given Service Catalog , or if certain specific Locations might restrict the use of a Service Feature. This requires Customer Service Representatives and Customers who might desire these features to have access to an alternate way to identify what is available. This also makes it less intuitive to identify what might feature might be currently on a Service , since a User might not consider looking at the list of Charges on a Service to look for the presence of a feature. If multiple different Charges are already on a Service, it could make locating a specific item difficult may be challenging to locate those charges from within PCR-360.
Additionally, if your Organization is not Billing for a Service Feature, these features would be tracked as a Charge on the Service for $0.00 for each Billing Cycle, which may seem strange to a Customer when reviewing their Bill.
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When using UDFs to track a Service Feature, the feature can be directly requested within CustomerCenter, and makes identifying the presence of the feature quickly accessible from internal application records. However, this will not cause the feature to appear on the Bill, which may make the User of the Service confused when they review their Bill. When not Billing for use of a Service Feature, using UDFs is the recommended method for tracking Service Features. The use of UDFs makes make it very clear internally what is available , and what is presently active for the Service via the UDF Tab.
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Using Charges and UDFs
When using both Charges and UDFs to track Service Features, your Organization can get the best of both other methods, with only adding a little extra complexity to ensure the status of the Charges is synchronized with the UDF fields. Through the use a combination of a Custom EventEvents and Escalations your Organization can setup set up an internal process that when a Service Feature is added or removed from a Service, the Charge will be directly added or stopped on the Service. This does have the limitation of not being able to apply the Charge to the Service Order where the work for the change was done. When Billing for a Service Feature, this is the recommended method for use in tracking to track Service Features. When not Billing for a Service Feature, this is still the encouraged method, so that the Bill will be the clearest as to for what a User is being charged for.
Sample Custom Event to Sync the status of a Charge based on a UDF Value
(this section needs to wait until the code is reviewed, and should be an excerpt to pull in that code from a Custom Event Library page)