UCaaS providers often get crushed under the weight of monetizing their offerings while trying to launch next-generation services. Deciding how to package and price the various products and offering can be mind-boggling, and many UCaaS providers often lose a lot of revenue when these decisions are based on instincts rather than facts. How do you address customer demands while maximizing revenue? How do you track various solutions at the granular level? How do you adapt your offering to deliver flexible licensing models that meet changing market demands?
A robust monetization solution can offer UCaaS providers a significant advantage. By seamlessly integrating with a multi-vendor, multiple-technology landscape, it enables reduced time-to-market for new offerings as well as monetization of next-generation services – faster and far more effectively than competitors. Such seamless connectivity can drive new revenue opportunities by delivering superior customer experience and can enable faster rollout of converged services for improved efficiency.
Here are the 7 critical pillars of monetization solution for UCaaS providers:
- Product and Service Offer Management:
An optimized product and service offer management is one of the main requirements of any monetization solution. As a UCaaS provider, you need to understand how customers will use your various products and services – you can deliver the solution as a service over the cloud, and easily track customer behaviors. An in-depth analysis of customers can allow you to identify patterns in a transparent and automated way. You can easily determine who is using what, when, where, why, and how, as well as get insight into preferred features. This can help in better understanding of how the products are utilized by certain types of users and can enable you to tailor them to meet specific requirements.
- Customer Experience:
Customer expectations have changed dramatically; they now look for a new breed of services – that can be offered to them through the channel of their choice. Engaging customers at the right time is critical; hence, you need to offer experiences that allow customers to upgrade or modify their service package – on the go. By responding in real-time to customer needs, you can better personalize offers, segment and target customers more effectively, offer a single bill for all the services consumed, and make meaningful offers at the right moment for improved satisfaction. And features like self-service portal and real-time ticket management can enhance the customer experience even further.
- Order and Service Management:
Robust order and service management capabilities are important to coordinate the order fulfillment functions and ensure successful completion of customer orders. You need to receive and recognize customer orders and coordinate all the actions needed to fulfill the order. Being a critical component of your monetization solution, order and service management orchestrates all the actions that need to be performed across provisioning, shipping, inventory, billing, and other fulfillment systems. It allows you to monitor and manage orders as they get fulfilled, and also automate tasks for quick closure.
- Subscription Life Cycle:
Different users have different needs, and with the advent of next-generation services, bandwidth requirements are growing rapidly. Modern users consume services at a rapid pace and get extremely frustrated with the elevated bills. As a UCaaS provider, you need to enable customers to have more control over their subscription plans and empower them with solutions they want, when they want, how they want and at a price they feel is appropriate. By offering various subscription options such as price personalization, flexible consumption, value-based pricing, elastic subscription, etc., you can ensure customers are benefiting from the right subscription type for their distinct needs – and paying only for the services they use. This can not only improve customer experience but also boost loyalty and encourage them to use services without fear.
- Billing and Revenue Management:
For any monetization solution, billing and revenue management ensures a steady flow of recurring revenue. As a UCaaS provider, you need to take complete control over the billing cycle and enable flexible and innovative billing options. Offering personalized, on-time and precise billing methods suited to customer needs can enable you to support them across the entire lifecycle. You can choose when customers are billed, define a custom bill cycle duration, select from various billing modes, and even apply the applicable taxes. From a standard recurring bill to on-demand billing, offering customers a billing method that can be tailored and customized to suit their needs is vital to limit delays and avoid revenue leakage.
- Finance Automation:
As the market changes over time, so must services that are offered to customers. The key is to do this in a way that does not result in a high cost associated with each change. A software monetization platform with built-in finance automation can allow you to make changes on-the-fly. You can continuously track and optimize the services you offer and extend their life cycle by refining and improving them over time. Automation can also enable you to recognize a variety of revenue sources covering a range of business models and help you comply with the necessary regulations across PCI, application, network and physical security requirements for improved safety and access.
- Analytics and Reporting:
With evolving technologies and rising subscriber needs, gaining a real-time view of customer behavior, business growth, revenue, channel partners, and operations and performance has become a requisite. A monetization solution that offers analytics and reporting can enable data-driven decision-making with a real-time view of financial performance. It can help you develop effective plans to generate revenue opportunities and improve customer experience. Using analytics, you can launch differential policies and plans that can help you foray into a variety of new business prospects and revenue generation modes. You can get insight into usage patterns, revenue patterns, traffic patterns, network performance, subscriber preferences etc. through dashboard-based reports, monitor and measure data growth, and improve predictability.
Unlock New Revenue Opportunities
Changing user expectations and market conditions are compelling UCaaS providers to re-invent themselves. Providers that are held back by outdated, inflexible tools that defy transformation are now turning to modern solutions that allow them to overcome the limitations of conventional revenue management software. Cloud-based monetization solutions, that can be rolled out rapidly, enable providers to keep pace with consumer demand. With features spanning across product and service offer management, order and service management, subscription lifecycle, billing and revenue management, finance automation and analytics are reporting, a robust monetization solution is all you need to implement innovative business models, unlock new revenue opportunities and respond to customer needs in a way that inspires loyalty.
