The common perception within the IT and Telecoms reseller space is that billing migrations are painful and disruptive. This is a perception that we have tried actively to change – why should it be that difficult?
With hundreds of migrations completed in the last 3 years, we have continually fine-tuned our process, ensuring the transition for our partners is now seamless!
Billers moving to a new company or adopting a new system have more to manage than just a new interface; simple changes in everyday billing language can also be incredibly frustrating when getting used to a different billing platform.
The billing industry has a word for everything and sometimes many words for the same thing; “rejects”, “exceptions”, “suspense” or “unallocated” may all mean the same thing to many, but they’re not always carried over when you move platforms or billing providers. And in our experience, this causes problems.
Quickly getting to grips with a new platform is essential, not only to ensure the invoice accuracy, but to maximise margins and provide the best-possible end-user experience.
This blog explores the challenges billers face in transitionary periods and specifically the training resources Tekton has available to ensure that seamless transition!
Getting Used to a New Billing Platform –
Part 1: The Training Portal
From the start, Tekton supports its partners, not only ensuring customer migrations are performed within 8 weeks, but that partners have all the guidance they need, with ZOEY’s Training Portal making the transition from a different platform super simple.
All Tekton customers have access to ZOEY’s dedicated Training Portal during the migration process.
Key Training Portal sessions include:
- Refresh of the Demo and ZOEY Capabilities
- Admin Portal
- Monthly Billing Process
- Customer Portal
This enables new partners to practice their usual steps using dummy data to work out new workflows and test-out functionality, so that they have real-world experience and understanding before supporting their own customers in their ‘How to’ questions.
Given that resellers may have a wide range of products, services and income streams, Tekton has also made sure there’s just a wide range of services included in the Training Portal, ensuring the ability to manage SaaS, stand-alone, bundles and whatever else partners need to grasp, can all be explored before best practice procedures are set in stone.
Getting Used to a New Billing Platform –
Part 2: The Training Academy
Aside from the initial access granted to the dedicated Training Portal, we provide permanent access to ZOEY’s dedicated Training Academy.
The Training Academy is dual-purpose; it not only works as a standalone ‘how-to’ platform, but it allows users to search for educational articles on specific areas of interest too.
These educational articles (as well as ongoing support and advice from the Tekton team) provides the guidance, real-world experience and decades of billing wisdom that resellers need to perform innovative re-rating initiatives, maximising the margins our billers make from the services they buy. Channel operations can boost revenues in many ways – new products, better productivity, increasing margins, to name a few, and Tekton helps optimise them all.
Getting Used to a New Billing Platform –
Part 3: The Help Widget
Once you are up and running, ease of access to in-life training resources is hugely important, and that is why we have our in-platform Help Widget.
If a biller finds themselves stuck for how to progress, opening the ‘Help’ section within ZOEY launches the Training Academy’s in-platform widget, where users can search for whatever term they’re looking for, or know from a previous platform.
This ensures users can find the information they need without wasting time finding the right article or reading through a guide to only find it’s not what they were looking for.
Getting Used to a New Billing Platform –
Part 4: The Added Value
A big part of the training resources available at Tekton is ensuring our partners get “better” at billing; we don’t just want to allow our partners to learn how to do the same things they did before in their new platform, we want them to fully embrace and adopt the new functionality they have available to them and learn how to optimise their entire billing process!
A prime example would be when it comes to making batch changes. We’ve found that billers coming from legacy platforms, or if channel operations are relatively young, they may struggle to perform batch changes across their customer bases, especially start-ups using spreadsheet or accounting packages to keep costs low.
Making broad changes across customers bases, for example pricing updates for RPI increases or bolt-ons, is incredibly time consuming and the chance of human error creeping in and derailing everything is a constant threat.
With ZOEY, batch changes are easy – simply highlight accounts or lines using tick boxes (there’s a box for ‘all’ too) and set the change. ZOEY takes it from there and updates each value accordingly.
But if users aren’t used to making batch changes, how will they know? Not only can billing administrators practice using the migration Training Portal, but ZOEY’s Training Academy also walks them through the process step-by-step to ensure no stages are missed in the process.
And don’t worry – just because batch changes are available doesn’t mean just anyone can do it. ZOEY has a robust accountability process with admin-approval steps at each milestone to ensure no changes are made before invoices are run that could affect customer-facing bills.
Summary
All told, ZOEY is an incredibly simple platform – designed by billers for billers – to make everyday channel operations easier.
The support offered to new partners means they don’t have to worry about the usual ‘lull’ in productivity when embracing new systems. Employees have the learning resources they need, and decision makers can quickly access reports and educational articles to maximise margins!
In this transitionary period, with 5G, SoGEA and other fibre products coming onto the market and causing massive headaches for some platforms, now is the perfect time to take an honest look at the platform processes you have in place and see how they can be enhanced.
Book a demo with our team to see how ZOEY, Training Academy and the unrivalled experienced within our team can enhance your channel operation and ultimately, maximise your revenue!
