UCaaS in a Box – Open it!

Everything that you need to know for running UCaaS business

UCaaS in a box is your one-stop solution to speed up your UCaaS business. You can now effectively focus on your core business instead of spending valuable time on solving billing and compliance, automation and integration issues. With a track record of successful unified communication business, UCaaS enables you to deal with these challenges.

A futuristic Solution to UCaaS Challenges:

With more than 100,000 UCaaS service providers existing worldwide (Gartner report), and an expected exponential growth in the near future, UCaaS is the way the world is moving. Dynamic customer demands, increased competition, and revenue management are some of the factors that cloud-based service vendors must deal with.
Given the current demand and competitive factors, a differentiated strategy can make or break UCaaS providers. Typically, UCaaS service providers need a VoIP Carrier, a fax provider, equipment vendor (for desk phones), and a Softswitch to bridge the traffic from their customers to a carrier network.
They face a massive challenge to address errors prone to manual processes in disintegrated systems. This contributes to revenue leakage and restricts growth. Companies face significant challenges in processing and monetizing the usage data received from many carriers or the Softswitch.

Top Challenges faced by UCaaS customers:

Multiple Isolated Systems

Working with various systems do not allow for billing for unified communication leaving UCaaS customers dealing with a VoIP carrier, an Equipment provider for VoIP phones, and softswitch vendors.

1. 1. Rate CDRs from different sources:
      A softswitch simplifies the job for operators with only one format of CDR, irrespective of how many carriers they work with. However, on the flip side, the softswitch CDR does not give cost indication for the carrier. Adapting to rate for the new carriers and rating for other transactions like fax or cloud infrastructure are dealt by UCaaS.
   2. Problems associated with tax compliances:
      Calculation of taxes and tax filing are complicated with different rates and exemptions for different customers. While providing tax data in a format for customers to file, you need compliant tax calculation coupled with a provision for tax updates and compliances. Also feeding data into accounting systems would require tagging every charge with an accounting code and synchronizing the billing data into the system.
   3. Channel management and layered pricing:
      UCaaS vendors have resellers and must support various billing models like white label billing, bill on behalf of a partner, handle referral commissions and manage the business efficiently. The channel partners may want to add value-added services and may want to use the taxation for communication services, payment and electronic signature credentials from the UCaaS provider to avoid signing up with multiple entities.
   4. Flexible pricing options:
      With a request for different pricing and charging options, UCaaS has to provide flexible ways of charging and manage pricing for various types of calls. It is important to launch new flexible pricing plans at short notice to gain an edge in the market. Businesses charge separately for international calls, long distance calls and have exciting offers for free minutes.
   5. Subscription flexibility:
      Ease of upgrading, increase or decrease in users, subscription changes with an ability to take data from different systems and consolidate into a single invoice are vital features UCaaS needs. Moving data from excel to a bill is inefficient and error-prone. UCaaS requires a flexible subscription operations system that can be used anytime.
      UCaaS providers may also want to reflect the changes on a subscription to the downstream system. Billing for sale of vendor products and services such as Hosted Voice, SIP trunking is critical. UCaaS should be able to bill for these services. An integrated BSS platform approach is crucial to reduce manual errors and revenue leakage.
   6. Real-time Activation and provisioning:
      Automatic and accurate billing for various services and charges is essential for UCaaS. This can ensure that downstream systems are upgraded when there are changes. Seamless functionality must be assured to manage subscription status, activating new services, enabling a new feature or disconnecting services.
   7. Putting customers’ requirements first:

A feature that enables downstream vendors and providers to manage customers and subscriptions is of great help to UCaaS. Customers now ask for easy-to-use points to view, pay, and modify their usage.

1. UCaaS Business needs integrated Billing and Revenue Management:
   Allow us to introduce revenue automation platforms that simplify your day-to-day operations. OneBill seamlessly integrates with carrier platforms for DID acquisition as well as CDR processing, softswitches to provision services and equipment providers to manage device ordering. OneBill integration offers a flexible pricing engine to handle subscription charging, price customization, one-time charges and usage charging for various transactions like international calls, fax traffic, LD calls, etc.

How OneBill can help with UCaaS Services? 

• Automation framework using ProActive to talk to distinct downstream systems to automate the ordering process across systems
• Easy rule-based pricing system powered by a rating engine to compute different types of transactions as well as various forms of rating
• Integration with industry standard taxation solutions to do accurate taxation
• Flexible partner management to handle different types of channel relationships
• Simple to use and powerful pricing designer to set up charging for current services and expansion
• Thorough subscription management with an ability to change plan and quantity at any time as well as from different channels
• Ability to process CDRs from different platforms set up pricing for different products/services and consolidate all charges into a single invoice.

UCaaS businesses need a turnkey solution which provides key features to handle UCaaS BSS with maximum automation, flexible rating, accurate taxation. UCaaS in a Box gives way for a provider to quick start his business operations in a short span of time.