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Overview
For With all of the various Service Features that augment the details of an individual Service, tracking these features can prove a challenge for many organizations. PCR does not recommend tracking these features as Services themselves within PCR-360 because this potentially complicates the appearance of the Services when on a Bill, and it is not intuitive to associate two different Services together. Due to the flexibility of PCR-360, your organization has a variety of possible options. Which option is selected will be dependent on Organizational needs.
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 no 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
Using Charges
When using Charges to track a Service Feature, the feature will be directly visible on a Bill under the Service. This makes it clear to those reviewing the Bill what is related to their Service. However, when looking at the Service, it may not be intuitive for managing the Service's related features to look at the Charges Grid on the Service to see what features are currently on the Service. This also can make reviewing what features are available for a Service rather difficult because a User would need to know what Charge Catalogs are allowed to be on their Service.
For Billable Service Features, which are available for all Services, when there is not a notably long list of Service Features that will be offered within your Organization this can be a simple solution for tracking purposes. When not Billing for a Service Feature, using Charges to track the use of Service Features might look strange, since these would have to be represented by Charges of $0.00 on the Service for every Billing Cycle. Due to the practice, and external record keeps needed to manage this tracking system on a larger scale, PCR recommends this method only be used if your Organization wishes to begin to explore Billing for Service FeaturesTracking Service Features may seem like the ideal solution for tracking the Billing of Service Features. They are easy to apply to a Service, will display on the Bill so the Users are aware of everything they are paying for, and can be seen on a Service's Charges Tab to see what is presently active on the Service.
It takes additional lookups to see what types of Service Features might be available for any given Service Catalog or if 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 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.
PCR recommends this process for when your Organization begins exploring the option of Billing for Service Features, as this is not an ideal solution for tracking these features.
Using UDFs
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 and Charges to track Service ChargesFeatures, 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 UDFs and Charges
(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)