Target Skills:

Ability to discuss and describe the major features of Netscape BillerXpert 1.0.
 

 

BillerXpert Product Overview

This brief overview will cover the main features and advantages of Netscape's BillerXpert product.
 

Features Overview

  • Personalize statement presentation and set notifications of new bills to match customer requirements and business processes. 
  • Capture customer information with flexible registration templates and membership management database. 
  • Conduct interactive marketing campaigns through event-based relationship management, user activity tracking, and targeted email. 
  • High availability features include fail-over, failure recovery, and distributed state and session management. 
  • Integrate with existing billing systems through data extraction and loading services. 
  • Support multiple payment types, including credit cards and checks. 
  • Reduce time-to-market with prebuilt, customizable application templates designed for several industries, including telecommunications, cable TV, utilities, and financial services. 

Supported Platforms

BillerXpert runs under Solaris 2.6. Platform requirements:

  • Memory: 128MB minimum, 256MB recommended
  • Disk space: 3GB available hard disk space

The supporting components for BillerXpert are:

  • Netscape Application Server - Provides Java application support
  • Netscape Enterprise Server 3.0 - Provides HTTP services over the Internet
  • Oracle 7.3.4 - Provides transaction database services

Product Details

Comprehensive Internet Bill Presentment and Payment Solution

Traditionally, companies have viewed bill payment and processing as a nonstrategic function. Across such industries as telecommunications, financial services, cable television, and utilities, companies have operated billing as a cost center, frequently outsourcing the entire operation. The Net Economy presents companies with the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging Internet bill presentment and payment by using it as a means to build and manage customer relationships.

Provide Customer Convenience

With Netscape BillerXpert, your customers will enjoy a new level of service and convenience. They can view bills online through any browser 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Flexible payment options let them pay by credit card or by check, or even schedule bill payments for a future date. Email notification alerts them to the arrival of new bills, past-due payments, and special offers and promotions. Personalization options allow them to view statements based on their own preferences.

Build Customer Loyalty

By providing a better level of service, offering customers new conveniences, and providing customers with more control over their finances, companies can strengthen customer relationships and minimize churn. Customers can view bill summaries or drill down to line-item levels of detail, thus giving them access to the right level of information at the right time. For business-to-business billing, BillerXpert provides deep statement analysis and reporting. Statement search and analysis capabilities give customers the ability to track spending over time and find critical information in current or past bills.

Generate New Revenue Streams

The targeted marketing capability of Netscape BillerXpert can help companies turn billing from a cost center into a revenue opportunity through cross-selling and sales of new services to current customers.

Supports High Availability and Fault Tolerance

Netcape BillerXpert enables maximum application availability by eliminating any single point of failure. Failover capabilities help ensure that billing information continues to be processed in the event of a server failure. Failure recovery features include auto-detection and auto-start of failed servers and processes. Distributed state and session management helps ensure that no application or user data are lost in the event of failure.

Provides High Performance and Scalability

Netscape BillerXpert supports a high volume of concurrent users through optimized end-to-end performance features, including support for advanced connection caching and pooling, results caching, data streaming, and a fully multithreaded, multiprocess architecture. Scalability features include dynamic load-balancing and point-and-click application partitioning to enable applications to scale dynamically to support thousands of concurrent users.

  • Four-tier, fully distributed deployment architecture ensures no single point of failure.
  • The high performance of Internet Directory Server and Application Server enables scalability to millions of users.
  • Features an advanced, proven load-balancing system based on fine-grained application statistics.
  • Incorporates cluster fail-over capabilities to ensure that the application continues to function in the event of a server failure.
  • Offers dynamic application enhancement, enabling upgrade of the application without shutting down the system.

Reduces Time to Market

Netscape BillerXpert supports integration with enterprise billing systems through data extraction and loading services. It integrates with multiple data formats including print streams, ASCII text, and XML. Netscape BillerXpert provides pre-built, customizable application templates designed for numerous industries incudng telecommunications, cable TV, and financial services. Netscape Application Builder enables customization of presentation templates and business rules. A suite of easy-to-use application designers automatically generates application objects and templates.

Bill Personalization and Notification

Present multiple levels of information, from bill summaries to line item detail. Users can view past and present statements to discover spending trends. Parametric search capability lets users easily find critical information across present and past statements. Send email notification of new bills, overdue payments, or special offers.

Customer Enrollment and Registration

Templates can be customized to collect additional information about customers, such as hobbies, occupation, etc. Customers can securely manage and update account information, thus minimizing support calls. Includes reporting tools for tracking and analyzing membership activity.

Targeted Marketing

Use single or multiple user attributes contained in membership database as targeting criteria. Event-based relationship management captures and acts on user events, including registration, bill payment, and search. Launch multiple marketing actions, including sending targeted email displaying advertising banners or presenting a personalized page via a single user event. Define additional events and actions based on your business processes. User activity tracking enables fine-grained analysis and reporting of user behavior.

Integration With Existing Systems

Extract data from existing billing systems for presentation over the Internet. Integrate BillerXpert with multiple data formats, including print streams, ASCII text, and XML. Manage the loading process via a browser interface or scriptable command-line utility.

Multiple Payment Methods

Real-time authorization keeps users updated on the status of their transaction. Provides secure transaction processing via SSL encryption. Open Payment Interface (OPI) enables integration with additional payment types and existing systems.

A Flexible, Extensible Solution

Includes Netscape Application Builder integrated development environment (IDE) for customization of presentation templates and business rules. Comes with fully documented SDK and APIs. Allows secure, remote administration from any desktop. Application configuration information and user information are stored in a central directory. Uses a modular system design to allow application components to run on multiple systems, such as a cluster configuration for enhanced high availability, scalability, and security.


Produced By Netscape Learning.  Copyright © 1999 Netscape Communications Corporation