If you have subscribers who are going on an extended vacation or spend part of the year in another part of the world, there are several ways you can approach billing for these for the convenience of you and your subscribers:
- If they rent or lease the equipment and need access to the location, you can change their package to a low-cost, appropriate-bandwidth package to suit their usage needs while they’re away. In this case, you would continue to auto-bill them and automatically charge their credit card or checking account.
Note: We think this is the best practice as of this writing since it continues to deliver value to the client and maintains an active relationship with the subscriber. - If they own the equipment or you don’t invoice for the equipment costs, you can completely Hibernate their package using this new feature.
- You can also set up a package for internet access and a separate package for equipment, then hibernate only the internet package.
- You can also enable self-hibernation per-package, which is useful if you are serving monthly recurring packages in a multi-dwelling unit such as a college dorm. Hibernation can then be set up to allow the subscriber to maintain their account without a call to your customer service staff.
- Some companies charge a reactivation fee.
Hibernating a package will automatically exclude it from billing until it is re-activated.
Hibernate is fully integrated with Visp’s HyperRadius and SmartSession, so enabling support for package hibernation is quick and easy!
To configure Hibernation options, open the Settings window, then go to the Packages tab. Then select the package for which you want to enable hibernation, click on Options and the Allow hibernation for this package checkbox. Then set the values for the other fields as you see fit.
Once hibernation is enabled, these packages may then hibernate directly from the Packages tab in the lower tabs.
Also, you can schedule a package to hibernate on a particular date on the last hour of the day.
