DoEPION

【80% reduction in inquiry-response tasks! Knowledge sharing for operational efficiency】

NTT Finance Corporation, a major company in the NTT Group that provides cutting-edge financial, settlement, and billing services, offers a service named “Billing ONE for Businesses ”.
NTT Finance introduced our cloud-based Q&A system “BPUSS” to improve the efficiency in their inquiry-response operations regarding “Billing ONE for Businesses”.
We conducted an online interview with Mr. Sato, the person-in-charge of the service, and asked him about the background and results of the introduction of BPUSS.

NTT Finance Corporation

Billing Business Division

Billing Solutions Department

Mr. Yusuke Sato, person-in-charge of service development

ーThe issue was the increasing number of inquiries from sales representativesー

Doepion
Please tell us about the duties you have in your position.

Mr. Sato

We provide various solutions to our clients’ billing and payment issues. I am in charge of the development, operation, and maintenance of “Billing ONE for Businesses”.

ーWhat is “Billing ONE for Businesses”?ー

Doepion
What is “Billing ONE for Businesses”?

Mr. Sato

“Billing ONE for Businesses” is a service that consolidates invoices issued by multiple telecommunications companies or multiple utility companies into a single invoice. This service reduces the burden of checking, journaling, and paying a large number of invoices and bills and improves the efficiency of accounting operations.
It also has functions that support cost analysis and monitor the state of utilization of various services. By including these functions, “Billing ONE for Businesses” can be used to resolve various operational issues.

Doepion
It is true that accounting personnel have to deal with a huge volume of invoices sent in various formats every month. I understand that the service dramatically streamlines the monthly burdensome tasks.

Corporate “Billing ONE” provided by NTT Finance

ーIssuesー

Doepion
What were the issues you sere facing?

Mr. Sato

As I mentioned earlier, we are in charge of the development, operation, and maintenance of “Billing ONE for Businesses”.
Our problem was that the knowledge sharing regarding inquiry-responses was insufficient.
We receive a large number of inquiries from our sales representatives every day.
Many of the inquiries involved questions that we had already answered in the past or were simple questions that could be answered by checking the specifications or manuals.
Due to the lack of knowledge sharing, we had to spend a lot of time responding to such inquiries.

Doepion
How much time did you spend responding to inquiries?

Mr. Sato

At the peak, we handled more than 10 inquiries a day, and each inquiry took 30 minutes on average to confirm and respond to.
It means that the majority of each day was spent just responding to inquiries.
This made it difficult for us to focus on our core duties.

Doepion
That means about 5 hours a day.
It was indeed a big problem that you didn’t have enough time for development, operation, and maintenance, which were your main duties.

ーThe deciding factor in introducing BPUSS was its usabilityー

Doepion
How did you decide to introduce BPUSS?

Mr. Sato

Given that our problem was the lack of knowledge sharing and efficiency, the operability and usability were most important for us.
When I actually tried BPUSS, all I had to do was to enter a keyword I wanted to look up and click the search button, and Q&As that contained the keyword were displayed in a list.
I thought users could easily find the item that they wanted to know.
The usability and ease of searching were our major deciding factors.

Doepion
We also placed great importance on the usability, and we proceeded with the development based on opinions from our personnel in charge of practical operations.
We are very happy to hear that you find BPUSS easy to use, as we focused on making a utility interface that allows intuitive operation.

ーEffects of introducing BPUSSー

Doepion
What has changed since the introduction of BPUSS?

Mr. Sato

Before introducing BPUSS, we used to respond to inquiries using Excel.
After migrating the data that had been accumulated on Excel to BPUSS and as we started to use BPUSS, the number of inquiries similar to past inquiries decreased, and we were able to encourage self-resolution.
It used to take about 5 hours a day at the peak to respond to inquiries, but I feel that it has now been reduced to about 1 hour. This has allowed us to focus on our core business.

Doepion
Thank you very much.
In order to encourage self-resolution, it is important that using BPUSS becomes a routine. I think the usability of BPUSS, as you mentioned earlier, has led to increased efficiency in handling inquiries.

ーCentralizing and consolidating knowledge in BPUSSー

Doepion

What are your future prospects?

Mr. Sato

We would like to establish an environment that enables us to respond to our customers even more promptly. Currently, we are using BPUSS only for “Billing ONE for Businesses”, but we would like to use it to centrally manage inquiries regarding other services as well.

Doepion
For services other than “Billing ONE for Businesses”, you will also be able to concentrate on your core duties by entering many Q&As (questions and answers) into BPUSS.

Doepion
Lastly, do you have any announcements to make?

Mr. Sato

We are offering “Billing ONE for Businesses” to streamline complicated billing and payment operations.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns about your operations, no matter how trivial they may seem. Thank you.