The Internet is increasingly recognised as the future medium for developing improved customer relations. Telecommunications service providers are increasingly under competitive pressure. They need to offer new services and continually improve the relationship with their customers.
Billing is an area that both customers and service providers wish to improve.
Every few months most customers are posted a bill listing the calls made and amount owing. However by using the WWW customers could access their last bill any time, examine unbilled calls and integrate this data into accounting systems. This would be a new service whereby customers could view their telephone bills or accounts through the Internet. Unlike the hard copy monthly bill, customers could access all calls at any time, sort and filter the information through various fields on the user interface. Much of the infrastructure developed for Telecommunications Billing Access could also be applied for other online functions.