As today’s customers demand more flexibility in the way they buy and use products and services — from B2B SaaS platforms to communication service providers to utilities and beyond — it’s becoming increasingly critical for businesses to offer customizable billing models such as service and product bundling, usage caps, varied rating methods, personalization, promotions cross-product discounts, and other incentives that enable customers to pay for only what they need, when and how it’s convenient for them. After all, with competition booming in every industry, the customer is in control, and when a business can’t or won’t meet them where they are, they’ll move on to a service provider who can.

However, most traditional and legacy billing and revenue management systems can’t handle the flexibility or breadth of functionality required to meet customers’ unique, varied, and evolving needs. These old-school systems are built to handle fixed pricing models and require significant programming to make adjustments and add new types of pricing.

The results, as businesses try to scale with their legacy systems, often include gnarly errors in data processing, delayed invoices, payment obstacles, and revenue leakage. In other words, dissatisfied customers, missed opportunities, and a hurting bottom line.

The Solution: Upgrade Your Legacy System to an Agile Monetization Platform

If you are selling products and services on a subscription basis and you’re growing rapidly (or planning to), it might be time to consider replacing that legacy system with an agile monetization platform that will support all the growth, evolution, and rapid pivots that come with scale.

Benefits of Agile Monetization Platforms

While homegrown or legacy billing platforms tend to balk at rapid growth and change, requiring a billing expert or other manual support — and weeks, at best — to make changes, an agile monetization platform is built to help your team meet your customers’ needs before your customers even fully realize them. The right platform will enable your organization’s front office to keep customers loyal and satisfied while streamlining your AR to your back office operations, ultimately empowering you to launch and repackage services quickly, offer a wide variety of billing models and promotional configurations, keep operating costs down and maintain transparency in every piece of the quote-to-cash process — no matter how fast you’re growing.

Of course, like every field, the billing industry is crowded with vendors offering solutions for growing businesses. So, what should you look for in an agile monetization platform vendor?

• You want to find a vendor whose solution can reliably and securely handle and process customer data, with a powerful rating engine that can combine usage-based billing with recurring charges in any number of configurations.
• You want a vendor whose platform includes a flexible product catalog that makes it easy to launch new products and services, repackage existing offerings, create promotions, and identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities — without manual intervention or SKU proliferation.
• You want a transparent platform that gives you crystal-clear visibility into every workflow and every step of the billing process, enabling your team to catch and resolve any discrepancies before they become messes.
• You want a system that plays well with others. It should be easy for nontechnical staff to use, and it should integrate seamlessly with other front- and back-office solutions.
• And you want a vendor that is willing to get to know your industry and your organization, working with you to configure a billing system that meets your unique needs to propel your business’ growth.

Learn more about how to select the right billing platform for your business.

As a business’ customer base grows and its offerings become more varied and complex, it’s natural to find friction with existing systems. But too many companies take the lean approach to updating these systems, adding patchwork features and adjustments to keep the legacy systems viable as long as possible. But in the long run, this approach costs more in time, money, manpower, and lost opportunities than an upfront investment in a system designed specifically with flexibility and scale in mind.

If your organization is beginning to feel that friction — or better yet, if you’re not feeling it yet, but you’re laying the groundwork for significant growth — the team at Gotransverse would love to learn about your billing needs and discuss whether our platform is the right solution for your business. We invite you to take a tour of our platform and contact us today for a free, personalized demo.