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USING ONTIME TO PAY UPGRADE DOWNPAYMENT

Owned by Olanike Dairo (Unlicensed)
Sept 17, 2021
3 min read

This action can only be performed by these following roles:

  • System Process Officers

NORMAL WORKFLOW

When PAYG customers want to upgrade, they need to call the call center in order to book the upgrade.

This call allows us:

  • to check if customers are actually entitled to upgrade (they need to have a contract performance > 95%, their box needs to be on, their expire date needs to be in the future)
  • to move the customer into the correct "Pay Upgrade Downpayment" state
  • to know which new product they want and work out their new daily rate (i.e. work out how much time left they will have in their account after upgrading).

Without this call, the system has no way of knowing which products the customers want and even if they are entitled to upgrade!

After calling the call center, customers have 4 hours to pay the upgrade down payment. If they do not pay within this time window, their upgrade will expire and they will have to make the call again.

If they made any payments during that time but the total amount is lower than the upgrade downpayment, these payments will be turned into time in their account.


WHAT IF THEY DO NOT MAKE THE UPGRADE CALL?

It turned out customers sometimes pay the upgrade downpayment without calling the call center. They just make a bigger payment and expect to be able to collect their new product(s) the next time they go to the shop.

This situation should never happen because they might turn up at the shop without even being entitled to upgrades. Besides, these payments will have been turned into time that the customers are using up.

However, to fix this issue, we created a function that allows for the use of on-time ( old payments ) to pay the upgrade downpayment.

The steps to use this functionality are the following:

  • make an upgrade call (at least a mock call in the ERP), to select which products they want to add to their package and to move the customers into the state "Pay Upgrade Downpayment". 
  • In the PAYG view, in the "On-Time Transactions" tab, supervisors are allowed to click on  :

  •      A pop-up window will show up. The user needs to select which payment(s)  to use to pay the upgrade downpayment.


  •     Once confirmed, the program will turn the time corresponding to the selected payment(s) back to cash, and then use it to pay the upgrade downpayment. If the total amount of the selected payments is greater than the upgrade downpayment, the remaining amount will be turned into time. The customer is moved into "Install/Collect Upgrade" and a "Downpayment" transaction will be created in the on-time transactions table.


WHAT IF THEY MADE THE PAYMENT BEFORE GOING PAYG?

A further issue is related to the fact that some customers not only did not make the call but also made the upgrade downpayment as "Paying Monthly Customers" and then got converted to PAYG before collecting their upgrade.

This means that they won't have available payments to use because all their old payments were linked to a "Conversion transaction". So, the button mentioned above will show no transactions to be chosen.

To cope with this situation, we added a second button (this is visible only to admin users): . This button will prompt a pop-up window where the user should select the only conversion transaction available, and after confirming the program will unlink one of the linked payments and use it to pay the downpayment. Again, the customer is moved into "Install/Collect Upgrade" and a "Downpayment" transaction will be created in the on-time transactions table.