What Does Successful Billing Look Like for Modern Communications Companies?

The communications industry is evolving faster than ever, with customers demanding more services, options, and value from their providers. To meet these expectations and maintain market share, communications service providers (CSPs) are constantly launching new products, adopting new technologies, partnering with other providers, and participating in marketplaces.

However, bringing these innovative offerings to the market requires significant upgrades to both front- and back-office solutions, particularly in billing.

The Challenge: Traditional Billing Solutions Can’t Keep Pace

For CSPs planning to stay ahead of customer whims—not to mention any efforts to scale—flexibility and speed are both critical capabilities. Unfortunately, most legacy and DIY billing platforms don't offer either. As initially constructed, they were built to accommodate the business' needs "back then," without future growth in mind. They may be ideally suited for simplistic models and low transaction volumes, but when you ask them to take on more sophisticated offerings, growing user numbers, and complex partnerships, they start to jam up.

Limping along with an outdated system is a significant barrier to growth, leading to lost opportunities, lost customers, and lost revenue. But CSPs’ sophisticated monetization needs, pitted against the cloud billing solutions available, can sometimes make it seem challenging to make the upgrade. So, when it’s time to update systems, many companies take a lean approach, simply adding new features and updates to avoid upfront replacement costs. While the frugality is understandable, this approach costs more in the long run, as every painstaking upgrade results only in a system that works okay for now. Inevitably, the business will outgrow the updates, and the piecemeal changes will create a system that resembles Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together piece by piece and grunting and groaning under the pressure of growth.

So, what should communications service providers do instead?

The Solution: Intelligent Billing

Savvy CSPs can accelerate their business by adopting the right intelligent billing platform. Of course, there are plenty on the market, and it can be overwhelming to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here’s a list of capabilities to look for as you start your search:

• Elasticity & scalability: Demand will inevitably fluctuate. There will be slow seasons, busy seasons, and unexpected disruptions. The correct billing platform includes elasticity and scalability, making it easy—and cost effective—to add capacity during peak times and slow it back down with the lows.
• Configurability: The right platform can be easily tailored to your particular needs—with no coding expertise required.
• Sophisticated pricing: Complex pricing models require sophisticated mediation and rating engines to manage and monetize usage data.
• High-volume capacity: Look for scalable cloud technologies and virtual architectures to power growth—not inhibit it.
• True partnership: The right intelligent billing vendor is more than a sales department—it’s a true partnerwith expertise in the communications industry, with dedicated teams who understand the intricacies of communications billing.
• Security compliance: Customer information security is more important than ever, so look for a vendor with the right certifications (someone who’s PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 1 Type II compliant, for starters) to be sure your security remains ironclad.
• Transparency: The right platform can provide insight into the entire order-to-cash process, with real-time visibility at every step of the way— right down to revenue reporting.

Ytel & Belong: Modern Communications Billing Done Right

Two of Gotransverse’s clients, Ytel and Belong, are perfect examples of embracing modern billing practices to stay ahead of the ever-changing communications game.

Ytel, a communication platform designed to help businesses enhance the customer experience through integrated SMS and voice capabilities, was struggling to bill accurately for its more than one billion monthly email, text, and voice conversations, with varying payment plans, carrier surcharges, and taxes all complicating matters. Not to mention, of course, trying to grow the business. The bottom line was that Ytel’s billing platform was holding the company back from achieving the growth levels it aspired to.

To close the revenue gaps from the business's deficiencies in its order-to-cash process, the CFO began searching for an intelligent billing system that could break down usage into accurate charges and invoices, integrate with other back-office platforms, and scale right along with the business. Ytel was also looking to add prepaid billing allotments and discounts to its models, account for taxes, and migrate customers to a self-service platform to reduce support overhead. The team at Gotransverse was happy to help, and our platform offered most of Ytel’s required features right out of the box.

After implementing the Gotransverse platform, Ytel saw unprecedented accuracy—and unprecedented ease—in its billing system. Executives were no longer spending hours and days, and weeks reconciling invoices; instead, the entire system was managed by two billing administrators. Revenue leakage stopped when replenishment orders and payments were fully automated. Every client had an open line of communication with the accounting department, and Ytel had the opportunity to establish new revenue models.

Belong, an Australia-based mobile and broadband digital connectivity services, began expanding its services to meet customer needs and demands and improve the user experience. One of the highlights of that expansion was a self-service portal that empowers customers to manage their own subscriptions. But with that incredible growth came the need for more sophisticated systems to maintain their user-friendly billing options. Activating new services manually for consumer and commercial customers was time-consuming and inefficient. As Belong added new services, they needed a more flexible, sophisticated system to handle all their transactions.

Again, Gotransverse was happy to get on board! Our job was to help Belong automate customer billing, enabling them to offer new products into the market quickly. Our goal was to empower Belong to deliver new mobile and broadband services quickly and efficiently, enabling them to allow customers to manage their accounts online, activate new services using automated provisioning systems, and so much more.

Learn More About Gotransverse

Billing experts founded Gotransverse with centuries of global communications expertise. We saw the communications and other industries moving towards more sophisticated pricing models to grow revenue and built advanced rating and billing engines to accommodate this shift into our platform from the very beginning. We have the flexibility to cater to a disparate set of requirements that can manage numerous contracts with multiple carriers and data sources. With Gotransverse, communications companies can capture and monitor usage data from a large number of devices across multiple data sources, including legacy systems.

We invite you to learn more about Gotransverse’s communications billing solution and, when you’re ready, to request a complimentary demo. One of our experts will be happy to walk you through our platform and help you determine whether our intelligent billing platform is the best fit for your organization.