The focus for all companies is moving towards providing elevated customer experiences. Organizations understand that along with the products and services they offer, how they deliver these to the customer becomes of critical importance.
A report by Temkin Group shows, “a moderate increase in Customer Experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues!”
The Impact of UCaaS on Customer Experience
Seamless communication has become the hallmark of all successful businesses today. Owing to UCaaS services, communication in organizations adopting UCaaS has become as simple as pulling up a chair.
However, for UCaaS providers, billing can be anything but simple. Given the range of services and the customizations in the UCaaS galaxy, getting the right billing system in place can be a nightmare for most UCaaS providers. Wrong or complicated billing can also be the tipping point for customers and can impact their customer experience negatively.
And negative experiences can be costly in a competitive UCaaS world.
<h3>What Do Customers Want? </h3
What customers really want from their UCaaS providers is clarity and flexibility of services. They want:
- Better integrations with different software platforms.
- Highly personalized experiences and mobile integration.
- Collaboration between UCaaS and CCaaS to respond to their business and customer demands faster.
- Global coverage, delivery, and support considering the growth of the global economy.
Clearly, UCaaS providers must take a close look at their customization capabilities to ensure that they are able to fulfill the demands of their customers favorably.
Navigating The Billing Nightmare
What happens when you, as a UCaaS provider, are not able to manage the demands of billing in this universe of extreme customizations? Often, revenue either slips through the cracks without notice or the customer gets billed incorrectly.
Given the rising competition in the UCaaS market, customers today are not lacking in choice of providers. And often billing can be the breaking point for many good relationships and have a negative impact on the customer experience.
So How Can UCaaS Providers Iron Out Billing Issues?
- Provide Multiple Pricing Options: UCaaS being a subscription-based business must offer and capably manage multiple pricing options. These options must be complemented with supported variations for different product bundles or individual products. This can range from usage-based subscription services, monthly billings based on recurring services, hybrid (fixed recurring + usage-based) billing, volume-based pricing, rule-based pricing or even multi-year contracts.
The customer needs billing flexibility and to provide an elevated customer experience, UCaaS providers must support that. - Manage Complex Billing Cycles Correctly: Multiple billing options creates complexity in managing billing cycles correctly. A small error on your end can lead to a big charge for the customer. And will the customer be happy to pay for your error? The answer is a resounding NO.
While UCaaS billing might seem simple, it is so only at a surface level. Look deeper into the ‘Pay-Per-Use’ or ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ formats and you will see the complexity of transactional billing. UCaaS providers thus have to manage and track all the transactions in these billing modules and accurately calculate the charges at scale to ensure that the bills generated are 100% accurate. - Monitor and Manage Product Usage Charges: Given the immense flexibility of services in the UCaaS environment, ensuring great service delivery is one part of the equation for great customer satisfaction.
The other thing to bear in mind is to monitor and manage product usage accurately. UCaaS providers need good usage metering capabilities to compute charges on the basis of actual usage irrespective of the service unit (such as storage GB, MB, calls, minutes, licenses, features, software usage, data, messages sent, bandwidth, etc). UCaaS providers must have the bandwidth to track usage of any type and calculate the correct charges for zero-error invoicing. - Scale Easily: The needs of customers keep fluctuating. As they move into new locations and geographies, they want the UCaaS providers to keep pace with their growing need and offer scalability of services.
Bills generated must seamlessly accommodate all the changes in the services and pricing models to make sure that all the needs of the customer are capably addressed. Inefficiency in billing here can directly impact the customer satisfaction levels negatively which consequently impact the customer experience. This, in turn, can lead to customer churn. - Eliminate Accidental Billing Errors: We understand and customers know that UCaaS billing can be a complicated web. With so many pricing models, customizations, personalization, etc. at play, billing in this universe can hardly be simple. A simple manual change can have a UCaaS provider accidentally charging a customer twice. A wrong amount can be stated in an invoice. These accidental errors can cost a business not just revenue but reputation as well.
To eliminate accidental billing or billing errors UCaaS providers need to give their customers end-to-end visibility into their subscription. This ensures that the customer is billed correctly and builds trust in the minds of the customer.
The Billing System Impacts Customer Experience
Customer satisfaction is essentially the culmination of all experiences in a customer’s journey. UCaaS providers can guarantee elevated customer satisfaction levels when they can provide great, seamless and continuous services to the customer. Equally essential to elevated customer experience is ensuring that the customer does not spend time questioning the bill generated, finding faults and errors in these complex bills.
OneBill is a billing and subscription management platform that addresses all of these issues, optimizing UCaaS customer experience, and therefore, customer satisfaction. Discover a unified billing solution that works.
