unted product bundles. Many IICs use multiple billing systems to account for different services, though vendors have developed convergent billing systems designed to support any service, regardless of technology or special billing parameters. Convergent systems have been received with mixed reviews, however, and IICs often find themselves integrating components from different billing systems, including multiple rating engines, to create one, do-all billing system and process. 5.2 Convergent Billing Converging multi-service billing data is extremely important to CRM and customer retention. The first steps towards convergent billing included what was known as "electronic stapling." IICs used multiple applications to bill for The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS different kinds of services (local, long distance, Internet access, to name a few), only combining the data streams during the invoicing process to create a single bill for all services. IICs soon realized, however, that a single bill was not as important to the customer as a single, or convergent, view of the customer's services and usage. Providing a "convergent view" refers to a customer service representative's ability to access a customer's entire record using a single CRM application. This record would include an overview of the customer's services, statements, usage records, payment history and any other information the IIC deems critical to the CRM process. Ideally, the system would also use such information to prompt the CSR to up-sell new services or to suggest discounted service bundles. Many IIC back offices, working with multiple billing and customer management systems, require CSRs to access data from multiple systems, providing a disjointed view of the customer. This leads to more training dollars spent teaching CSRs to use multiple systems, longer hold times as CSRs search for information, redundant and error prone data entry processes and less personalized, less efficient customer service. A convergent system requires CSRs t