Case Study
Ytel Scales to New Levels with Greater Invoice Accuracy and New Billing Models Thanks to Gotransverse
Overview
When you have a cloud communications platform with an API that lets your customers create marketing campaigns consisting of high-volume email, SMS, or voice communications, you have a versatile platform that can be adapted for any form of customer campaign, support, or interaction. But how do you charge for usage? Do you charge by subscription; by individual interaction? How do you manage prepaid usage, track the balances, and know when to top up? How do you account for carrier surcharges, and what about taxes? As the amount of communications traffic through the system grows, how do you ensure accurate customer billing?
Faced with these and other billing challenges, Ytel needed a versatile system that could break down system usage into accurate charges. They needed an intelligent billing system that could handle accurate invoicing and scale with the demands of its growing business. They also needed a billing platform compatible with other back office platforms, including NetSuite. Gotransverse offered the perfect customizable solution to address Ytel’s usage-based billing needs.
Usage-Based Billing Was Out of Control
For Ytel, having a customizable API capable of handling 1 billion email, text, and voice conversations each month required a versatile billing system that could adapt to its growing list of services. They needed to be able to incorporate new variables such as volume-based pricing with minimum thresholds, carrier surcharges, and estimated tax. To simplify billing as service traffic increased, Ytel also decided to add a prepaid service offering, but with its current system it was too difficult to track account balances and intelligently trigger top-ups, notify users, & suspend accounts.
Unfortunately, their internally developed billing system couldn’t keep pace with the growth in customer demand and system usage. They were unable to scale to meet their current billing needs, and were, in fact, leaking revenue. An inability to track invoices and payments meant they were giving away services at no charge. For example, one customer accumulate over $100,000 in unpaid service usage before the debt was detected and service discontinued.
Billing inefficiencies were having an adverse impact on other aspects of company operations as well. The home-grown billing system required an arduous workflow process. As a result, Ytel’s executives were spending one to two weeks each month trying to reconcile invoices, determining what had been paid, what was still owned, and which customers were in collection.
It was clear that Ytel had outgrown its billing platform and if they were to achieve planned growth levels, they needed a more efficient, automated billing system.
Providing the Expertise to Deliver the Best Solution
Once it became clear that their existing billing system was obsolete, Ytel started looking for a flexible billing platform with the scalability they needed. Once Ytel’s CFO had identified revenue gaps due to deficiencies in the order-to-cash billing process, he remembered that from a previous job Gotransverse had been able to fill these gaps. The Gotransverse team was invited in to take a look at their needs and determine how best to solve their billing problems.
To follow its roadmap for growth, Ytel had to address specific billing issues, such as adding prepaid billing allotments and discounts and accounting for taxes for the service. They also wanted to migrate their existing customers to a self-service platform to reduce support overhead.
After reviewing senior management’s objectives and analyzing the system infrastructure the Gotransverse team determined that Gotransverse offered most of the required features out of the box, including:
- Fully automating billing and revenue recognition
- Calculating accurate charges per communication sent
- Accommodating volume discounts and mixed service billing
- Including an estimated tax as part of the service estimate
- Automating dunning and collections at all transactions volumes
- Integrating with the NetSuite ERP platform
- Supporting their payment gateway, facilitating an easy transition in a PCI compliant manner
- And more
Automated Efficiency Opens New Revenue Models
By implementing Gotransverse Ytel was able to automate its billing with unprecedented accuracy. Where previously senior staff were spending hours reconciling invoices, now the entire system was managed by two billing administrators. Replenishment orders are now fully automated with an immediate payment taken. Even the smallest volume accounts receive the same attention from accounting, where previously there was no means of effective communication or collection.
More importantly, Gotransverse enabled new revenue models. For the first time, Ytel could accurately track and charge prepaid usage accounts; a feature that is unique to the Gotransverse cloud platform. Gotransverse enables prepaid aggregation, tracking usage against fees already paid and automatically alerting customers when their usage credit became low.
Volume pricing also could be automatically applied and the commitments to hitting the volumes verified. The system even can accommodate mixed billing, including voice, SMS, and other communications in a single invoice, including a breakdown of individual service units. With Gotransverse in place, Ytel is finalizing plans to customize its prepaid and usage-based pricing with tiered services in the near future.
Adopting Gotransverse not only makes our current workflow more efficient and scalable, it also allows us to develop new revenue models that are more attractive to our customers. No business should be limited by its back office processes, and with Gotransverse we can adapt our billing system to the way we want to do business.
Conclusion
By adopting the Gotransverse intelligent billing system, Ytel now has a transaction processing system that can grow with its business. Usage- based billing can be scaled to any level and the system can handle as many transactions as needed. And Ytel can adopt multiple types of billing models without breaking the billing system and the company’s senior staff are able to focus on growing the business.