Billing is a key element of telecom operations. Though largely dominated by on-premise billing and CPQ solutions, SaaS-based revenue management platforms are increasingly being adopted by major players in the telecom sector.
Reports suggest that the cloud billing market for telecom is expected to grow from its humble figures of USD 2.449 Billion in 2016 to a staggering USD 8.22 Billion by 2021.
Read: Cloud Vs. On-prem Billing Solutions – What Should You Choose When?
But before we go into the details of how cloud CPQ and product catalogs can be a game-changer for the telecom sector, there is a need to understand the key challenges of the industry.
The telecom sector is arguably one of the most complex and challenging sectors in terms of offerings to customers. A complex network of plans, corresponding tariffs, add-on services, geographical preferences, and tight competition makes it one of the most dynamic business services available today. Add to this the layers of hierarchies and approvals within the organization for pricing mechanisms leading to delays in final customer quotes and unsatisfactory consumer experiences, which seriously impact loyalty and brand reputation.
The primary reasons for the poor customer experiences include –
- Diverse volume of offerings and sub offerings aimed for a different class of customers like individuals, corporates, government contracts, etc.
- Disconnected view of potential customers and their preferences.
- Legacy billing and revenue management technology that fails to leverage or harness the power of big data and intelligent AI-based price modeling.
- Errors in quotes and approval delays due to administrative complexities within the organization.
Navigating through these challenges can be quite challenging for telecom players with legacy technology solutions.
This is where SaaS Billing and CPQ solutions come into the picture. Telecom players can leverage flexible features of modern cloud-based billing platforms to offer a superlative customer experience and enable better pricing strategies to improve their business performance.
Let us examine a few ways in which modern cloud-based CPQ and product catalog solutions transform the customer experience for telecom companies.
Create strategic pricing schemes
Modern billing platforms enable telecom companies to roll out different pricing plans to lure customers and enable steady growth of loyalty for their brand. By leveraging the flexible price configuration capabilities of such platforms, service providers can create numerous classes and subclasses of pricing plans to target a diverse set of end-users and manage individual pricing attributes for various plans such as currency variations, tax code implications, etc.
Personalized pricing experience for customers
For winning the confidence of price-conscious customers, telecoms can leverage flexible price personalization capabilities of SaaS billing platforms to offer unique or special promotional prices or limited period discounts on top-selling plans to help improve business prospects. The platform also allows them to bundle services into highly attractive packages with personalized pricing that will be of great interest to users.
Managing contracts seamlessly
Telecom companies often enter into flexible contracts with different customers. Over time, these contracts may need amendments to its terms and conditions or include additional components and fee revisions for improved services. A powerful CPQ solution enables telecom companies to seamlessly enter or amend customer contracts based on their market favoring conditions. It creates easy to monitor customer dashboards, which allow different stakeholders from within the company to view, amend, or terminate contracts depending on their business value and contractual provisions.
Eliminate approval bottlenecks
The final step of a sales cycle is to generate a favorable quote for the customer, which has to be approved by different departments within the organization. With an integrated billing and revenue management platform, there is potential to leverage advanced automation to expedite the approval workflow. By eliminating repeated hierarchical processes, and by integrating with popular document verification platforms, it is possible for telecom operators to quickly generate custom quotes with an embedded organizational branding and logo. This quote can be directly shared from the billing platform to customers if the business workflow approves of such a transaction between the concerned person in sales and the customer. The approval flow can be automated to have a department or an individual review and approve the quote, with hierarchy rules. This greatly speeds up the sales cycle, and organizations can realize more benefits from faster time to market for new plans.
Cloud-based billing and CPQ solutions can certainly propel modern telecom operators into a new operational realm. From allowing easy integration to core systems to enabling faster and more accurate pricing scheme configurations, OneBill, a leading billing platform, helps telecom companies to redefine their customer experience and transition into the next level of personalized experiences. Get a demo today!
