Billing is a critical part of any business and a clear avenue for creating competitive advantage.
An effective billing solution should do so much more than simply produce accurate and timely invoices. It has the potential to add significant value to your business. It can help to increase sales, reduce costs, improve end-user experiences and even optimise margins.
In a fiercely competitive industry, where cost is king and the commoditisation of connectivity services is driving end-user pricing as low as possible, resellers need to squeeze every penny out of their margins to secure stable, long-term commercial success.
In this blog post, we focus on how you can optimise margins through your billing system.
How to optimise margins through your billing system
1. Complex tariff and rating capabilities
The ability to set complex tariff and rating capabilities provides resellers with the flexibility to refine their commercial strategy and maximise margins.
ZOEY has extensive tariff and rating capabilities. It enables partners to provide a true disconnect between wholesale and retail, helping maximise margins and catalyse growth. ZOEY allows resellers to restructure propositions, optimise bundles, and package 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.
2. Bundling capabilities
One of the major ways to reduce costs and maximise margins is to buy group data bundles from your network suppliers. You can then re-bundle them for your individual end-customer accounts. For instance, you can buy 100GB of shared data and sell it on as 10 bundles of 10GB. This results in classic economies of scale. You have more buying power and can purchase the data for cheaper, thereby reducing your costs.
It is important that your billing system can provide this disconnect between what you buy and sell. ZOEY enables the re-bundling of data packages to your end customers, separate from any purchased arrangements between the reseller and the supplier. ZOEY’s in-depth reporting capabilities ensure bundle allocations can be optimised based on actual consumption data. This prevents disparities between a customer’s purchased and available data allowances.
3. Charging increments
If you have any international customers, or those that regularly make international calls, one way to maximise their margins is by making use of charging increments (i.e. calling rates rounded to the nearest minute, rather than per second). This can be achieved via destination-based rating. Strongly defined rates like UK National can remain on per second billing, but perhaps commonly called international rates can be rounded to the nearest minute to provide better margins.
However, it’s important to note that before harnessing the potentials of charging increments, you’ll need to double-check your T&Cs, and possibly amend them. You need to ensure that this practice is explained, and that the rounding of calling rates is clearly described to prevent customer complaints in the future!
4. Supplier reconciliation
Human error can easily lead to missed charges that are overlooked, resulting in missed revenue.
To prevent this, performing regular reconciliation of fixed and subscription charges helps capture services which may have been provisioned with the supplier, but not added to the end-user’s invoice. As best practice, it’s also worth checking any existing billed services which may have changed particulars (quantity, tariff, etc) but haven’t been updated in the billing system.
ZOEY’s pre-invoice checks ensure no charges are missed. Our reconciliation wizards cover call files, usage charges, suppliers, supplier charges, credit and periodic charges to ensure all revenue is accounted for.
5. Data Insights
Telecoms billing is awash with data, from which valuable insights can be learnt.
Intelligent billing software can provide insights into customer behaviour, including usage, payment patterns, and other relevant data. This information can help businesses identify trends and adjust their pricing and marketing strategies to maximise revenue.
However, the right platform is required to translate and visualise this data into actionable insights. Some platforms are guilty of dumping reams of raw data. This gives the illusion that there’s easy access to lots of information. In reality, this raw data tells us very little. Even if you’re exporting data and manipulating it in an external system like Excel, then you’re wasting precious time.
Visualisation and comprehension, rather than raw data, is key. ZOEY’s revolutionary business intelligence reporting and margin analysis suite help resellers identify loss-making services, unallocated services and high-margin charges.
Conclusion
In conclusion, intelligent billing software can help businesses maximise margins by streamlining billing processes, improving accuracy, and providing valuable insights. With the right billing software platform, businesses can reduce their costs, increase revenue, and improve their bottom line.
Read our contribution, Creating a Competitive Advantage with Billing, featured within Comms Business magazine to find out more.
If your current billing platform doesn’t allow you to take advantage of these areas, it may be time to look elsewhere. ZOEY was designed from the ground up to provide forward-thinking resellers with tools that maximise your potential revenue and scale as your customer base grows.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to learn more about ZOEY, or even if you’d like a couple more tips on how to optimise margins through your billing system.
Book a demo of ZOEY at a time that suits you!
