Case Study by Wolters Kluwer (CCH® SureTax®)
Indirect Taxes for CSPs and How OneBill Flips the Script on Complex Billing and Revenue Management
Today’s communications service providers are stuck in a proverbial best-of-times, worst-of-times paradox.
- On the plus side, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the volume and length of calls up — to the tune of 800 million calls a day on Verizon’s network alone in 2020, with calls lasting 33% longer on average than they did pre-pandemic.
- “We’ve become a nation that calls like never before,” Jessica Rosenworcel, of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), explained to The New York Times. “We are craving human voice.”
- Attempting to satisfy that craving, though, comes at a high cost for communications companies. Collectively, they have an average customer churn rate of 22%, and an industry Net Promoter Score® (or “NPS,” an essential customer satisfaction measure) of just 31, ranking them well behind healthcare, professional services, consumer packaged goods, and virtually all other sectors.
Billing for the communications industry is very complex, because of the consumption-based pricing. You’re tracking rates based on the type of call — toll-free calls, local, or long-distance — length of call, time of day, as well as other variables. So, it makes it very, very hard for communications companies to capture subscriber usage and monetize that usage accordingly.
JK Chelladurai, Founder & CEO of OneBill
