Full Creative

Full Creative is a business services company with a foundry of ideas. Originating as a long-distance carrier in 1994, Full Creative has evolved into a diverse provider of software and services for teams to work together from anywhere across a diverse house of brands. Building tools and services that empower people to communicate, collaborate, and produce, Full Creative’s mission is to change how the world works with flexible communication services.

“We don't just want to change the world, we want to improve it through solutions that scale, empower and disrupt our expectations,” proclaims Full Creative’s website. Their mission is clearly evidenced by their growing product portfolio of forward-looking business services such as 24/7 live answering services, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) solutions, scheduling, chat, interactive voice response (IVR), and click to call.

Challenge

With multiple performing brands servicing many geographies, Full Creative required a robust billing platform that would support 15 different rate plans, free usage pool (FUP) prorating, standard monthly recurring charges, usage based overages, and custom plans.

In addition to meeting the requirements for various rate plans, Full Creative required seamless integrations with third party applications such as PayPal for Automatic Clearing House (ACH) payments completed via Paypal's Payflow gateway, PayPal Express Checkout, MailChimp for automated account status notifications, and Braintree for mobile payments. The ability to process multiple payment types including auto-payments, credit card, and ACH was mandatory.

Mediation was required to handle Full Creative’s rating rules applied to their call types including “inbound”, “outbound”, “active response”, “chat”, “IVR”, “supervisor”, and “spanish”. Rating based on time increments was also important. The accommodation of such requirements was the only way to provide Full Creative with the extensibility needed to support their product portfolio.

Full Creative also required a flexible billing platform that would invoice multiple product offerings, while supporting branding. Through APIs, custom email tokens would be required to tailor payments and invoicing. Custom invoice PDFs would summarize plan usage, overages, total charges, and payments. Additional templates would support various payment linking scenarios including refunds, partial payment linking, and partial refunds.

Full Creative selected jBilling as a strategic enabler of their transformative business services.

Solution

With a loaded basket of current requirements, and future requirements to support new ventures unknown, Full Creative selected jBilling as their trusted billing provider. jBilling’s “billing without assumptions” philosophy aligned completely with Full Creative’s approach to delivering innovative business services—uniquely branded and positioned in the market—enabled by the latest technologies.

jBilling’s open source platform featuring deep configurability, plugin architecture and 100% API addressability offered an ease of configurability that was previously unseen within the market. jBilling’s company hierarchy structure fit perfectly with Full Creative’s business model and was used to streamline the billing of multiple brands.

Through jBilling’s API addressable platform and plug-in architecture, billing was successfully connected with the requisite payment gateways. jBilling’s product catalogue configurability and ability to support multiple plans during order creation means Full Creative can accurately bill and receive payment for a number of uniquely customized plans.

jBilling deployed a Meditation Rating and Increments Management (MRIM) feature that rates the cost of a call based on different increment schemes for different call types and child companies. This feature provides great flexibility to Full Creative’s business team as they can mix and match rating schemes with increment schemes to come up with new plans. jBilling was also configured to support auto payments, free usage pools (FUP), prorating, and plan swaps, successfully meeting the needs of Full Creative’s billing requirements: over 15 different rate plans and 7 different mediation processes.

Jasper reports were created to produce custom invoices to reflect Full Creative’s brand identities.

A “paymentstoinvoice” API is enhancing the accuracy of Full Creative’s collections process, ensuring that payments are being applied to outstanding invoices prior to new invoices. A new API-based query mechanism gives Full Creative access to the database using pre-evaluated Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. Through data consistency reporting, Full Creative can determine billing gaps, inaccuracies, and strengthen the reliability of billing runs. “Anything we think of is doable within jBilling. Even if it’s not out of box, we can develop it quickly with time and materials,” comments Amith KC.

Full Creative also migrated to the jBilling Cloud to take advantage of an expertly managed, PCI-compliant and secure billing service.

Results

With jBilling meeting current requirements and positioned to satisfy future needs, Full Creative is free to focus on growing their business and go to market. “We didn’t want to build and maintain our own system. We wanted to use that time to build new Full Creative products to sell within the market,” remarks Amith KC.

jBilling is reducing the ongoing time and effort Full Creative spends on internal billing processes. Reporting efforts implemented within the jBilling system save Full Creative 90% of time previously spent reviewing billing, resulting in significantly streamlined operations.

 — Amith Kumar Chunnilal, Billing Project Lead, Full Creative