Unified communication businesses are trying to create ultimate customer experiences by offering multiple brands of services to customers, dealing with processing the usage records, billing, invoicing, payments, activation, operations to name a few. Moreover, they do have many pain areas. We caught up with some of them, and to our surprise, they have been expecting us.
Tax compliance:
More than 50% of the business struggle with manual/semi-automated ways for computing tax for communication services like VoIP, wireless, hardware+communication service bundles, internet, satellite, cable or IoT combined services. Setting up taxation rules for source and destination-based services, intra/inter location regulations, taxation policies for different states, exemptions and inclusions, applying special rates for specific scenarios (for example: toll-free calls, emergency numbers) dealing with Universal Service Fund (USF) contributions and optimization for tax-returns filing – the list is endless.
Product pricing and strategy:
Businesses tend to keep their product pricing fixed (for example $30/per user/mo). Taking one-size-fits-all approach towards product pricing fearing the need for an evolved billing platform ignores customers experience to offer services of what they need and how they need. Not to mention losing the competitive edge to other companies.
Generate single invoice for multiple services:
Businesses often struggle to combine their product offerings from various brands into a single bundle and generate one combined invoice to their end customer. No, we are not talking about those customers who are trying to use accounting software as a workaround (for example Quickbooks or Xero) to manually calculate charges, generate invoices through the tool and send it to customers manually via email. Furthermore, once the invoices were sent to customers, the ability to receive online and offline payments through payment gateways, or checks; reminding customers about invoice overdue, taking necessary actions based on organizational policies for overdue payments (like service suspension, applying late payment fees, downgrading the services automatically, etc) and trying to deal with these operations using semi-automated approach are some of the ground realities that UCaaS business deal with.
Fulfilling services activation manually:
Once the customers sign up for a service, fulfillment of the order or service activation and provisioning (service turn ON/OFF) needs to happen instantaneously. In most cases, businesses were handling order fulfillment manually giving an inferior experience to the end customers.
Multiple isolated systems:
Data sync between billing, invoicing, CRM, service desk, activation & provisioning systems, payment gateways and accounting systems is a nightmare and fragmented data versions across various software for the same customer. Integrating all of these systems and managing them to be in sync with billing and customer up to date information was a huge struggle.
Sounds like a familiar challenge? With the evolution of advanced billing and subscription management platforms like OneBill, these challenges can be the thing of the past.
