Case Study: Application Development – Billing and Information Storage Solution

The Client:

A major online business services company

The Business Challenge:

Links was asked to evaluate our client's web-based billing application and customer portal. The client had multiple problems related to customer billing, web site maintenance, information storage and retrieval, application expansion, and network performance.

Links identified the following related and relevant issues:

  • Customer billing had evolved into a manual process which took more than 10 working days to complete each month. Billing accuracy had dropped to under 75%
  • Corporate web sites were in need of programmatic and stylistic improvement in order to better capture new information
  • Internet and programmatic resources were not being used to collect and leverage customer data effectively
  • Network performance was sporadic as a result of frequent system crashes and inadequate server-level application load-balancing

The Solution:

Links performed its overall analysis and carried out the tasks identified in order to enhance our customer's ability to increase its competitive edge.

The solutions provided by Links are:

  • Links developed a custom application that automated the billing process. The new application reduced billing time by 80% and increased invoice accuracy to 98%
  • Links recreated the firm's Internet sites, adding customer information portals, updating the look and feel of the sites, and optimizing the various functions
  • Links expanded the existing database applications. The expansion resulted in our customer being able to sell new products that increased revenue by 20%
  • Links designed and implemented a web-based application to gather customer information. Using their existing network and application resources, our customer was able to automate the process of collecting and processing customer information