When discussing a telecoms billing system, you may naturally think about invoicing, revenue and margin optimisation. Indeed, without a billing system, a telco is unable to invoice its customers correctly based on their usage or to manage complex revenue streams.
However an effective billing system can do so much more to add value to your business. In the first of our Value Add through Billing series, we look at how you can increase sales through your billing platform.
Future posts will cover how to reduce costs, optimise margin, increase productivity, improve customer experience and ensure compliance so watch this space!
How to increase sales through your billing platform
1. Establishing a fully branded customer portal
The right customer portal can greatly affect your customers’ perception of your business.
Here at Tekton Billing, we offer a fully branded customer portal. Resellers enjoy truly personalised branding – custom URLs, logos, backdrops, colours, chart themes, fonts, and even social media integrations. Proper branding, that matches your own website, not only looks professional but helps build trust with your partners too.
In addition, we host your customer portal on your domain – something quite unique to Tekton Billing. Again, this seamless experience builds trust with your end-users and helps your business stand out from the crowd.
Many of our customers find that this slick user experience and white label branding helps attract new customers. They are impressed by the platform’s end-user functionality and ease of use. Therefore, an effective customer portal not only boosts brand credibility but helps drive sales too!
2. Reviewing your self-service functionality
We’ve found that self-service functionality can be a real USP for our resellers. While other platforms are still playing catch up, our customer portal enables resellers to offer online bill delivery, rich analysis, spend capping, usage and bundle alerting, estate management, and even real-time SIM swaps and call barring. Moreover, as an independent company, we can offer all these features across a range of wholesalers’ APIs.
Having this self-service functionality gives end users unparalleled visibility and control over their services. It allows you to offer a true out of hours service, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This goes a long way towards helping secure a sale.
Don’t just take our word for it though, read a testimonial from one of our partner’s end-customers:
“From exceptional customer service to a billing portal that knocks the leading industry alternatives out of the water! With easy-to-understand information and individual call usage, we can easily keep track of our spending and accurately manage our costs.”
3. Creating cross-selling opportunities
Our customer portal enables resellers to configure marketing messages that pop up as users access the portal. Moreover, these pop-up messages can be targeted to specific customers. For instance, you can place a mobile advert in front of a customer who only has landline.
This targeted communication allows you to promote other products in your business, helping to create cross-selling opportunities and generate new sales.
4. Billing all your IT and telecom services in one invoice
For convenience, end-customers choose to work with a single provider for their comms, connectivity, mobile and IT in a one-stop-shop. They therefore don’t expect these services to be billed to them on separate invoices.
If you are still issuing multiple invoices for different services, accounting and reconciliation can become laborious for your end-customer. This can often become an incentive for them to move providers.
5. Supporting dealers, resellers and SME’s
Resellers using ZOEY can drive more sales by launching a dealer channel. This allows 3rd parties to act as external sales resources or “introducers”. ZOEY supports them by;
- calculating and issuing commission statements
- producing co-branded customer invoices
- providing dealer level access to the portal so the dealer partner can view and manage their end-customer estate.
In addition, our commission module can be used to incentivise internal Account Managers and BDEs. This includes “Commission Buy Prices” to allow BDEs to negotiate bespoke sales pricing, while protecting the reseller base margins.
6. Separating wholesale and retail to enable complex tariff and rating capabilities
The telecoms reseller/MSP space can sometimes seem like a very crowded market. Many resellers opt to “pass-through” wholesale propositions on an as-is basis with a simple mark-up. With hundreds of resellers offering the same solutions, it can only become a race to the bottom, destroying reseller margins. Differentiation is key.
ZOEY allows resellers to restructure propositions, optimise bundles, and package up items to be sold on a retail basis. These can be entirely different to the purchased wholesale proposition. Offering these unique pricing capabilities can provide a very real competitive edge.
For example, one ZOEY partner uses this flexibility to “re-zone” international destinations (separately from how their wholesaler bills them). This means they can tailor international calling prices better to the requirements of their end-customer. Another partner offers introductory discounts on rental charges which automatically expire after a given number of months.
7. Sales Support
Having the right support in place can ensure you get the most from your billing software.
At Tekton Billing, our support extends further than technical support and training. Our team is also available to support your sales team to show them how to use our customer portal as part of your sales pitch to wow your prospects. We can even support your sales with live demos on your behalf, using the lessons we’ve learnt over the years to help you close a sale faster.
To us, it’s all about a partnership and we want you to grow as much as possible to meet your business’ full potential.
8. Customer Retention
There’s an old rule of thumb that says it costs 5 times more to win a new customer than to retain an existing one. With contract renewal tracking embedded in ZOEY, partners can easily keep on top of customer retentions.
Summary
Billing can be the make or break of a telecoms company. The right billing system can help improve your margins, better service your customers and as highlighted in this blog, even drive new sales!
A fully branded customer portal with self-service functionality, cross-selling opportunities, integrated invoicing and sophisticated rating capabilities will provide a seamless customer experience and real USP. These all feed into brand perception and customer satisfaction which ultimately result in increased sales.
We are delighted that many of our customers have won business on the strength of our ZOEY platform alone.
“Best billing platform for the Telecoms industry by far! Our existing platform was far too rigid and didn’t move with the times. Moving to Tekton was a breeze, far greater flexibility which in turn has led to greater profits! Support team are fantastic and queries are dealt with there and then on the phone. Anyone looking for a billing system for their Telecoms, look no further!”
