Service providers vying for greater market share and margin on subscription-based services and products can ill afford to relinquish control over their pricing to a single vendor nor inflated carrier costs to support a multi-carrier product set.
Locking your business in with a single carrier and their proprietary billing system may appeal on simplicity and cost at the start, but it’s a strategy that can potentially slam the breaks on business growth, diminish your buying power and cause a whole lot of headaches for your support and product offerings down the track.
And regardless of your existing vendor alignment, ensuring your billing system (and billing solution provider) is carrier neutral will safe-guard your business against industry mergers and the evolving carrier-service provider landscape. Here’s three main reasons why carrier neutrality is so important.
- Buying power
Maximising your capacity to capitalise on opportunities must be one of the top business goals for any progressive organisation. By remaining carrier neutral you have the advantage (and bargaining power) of developing a product portfolio that can span a number of Telco offerings – giving you the flexibility to choose the optimum solutions and usage plans that best fit with your customer’s needs.What’s more, carrier independence gives you the ability to by-pass intermediary distributors and go direct-to-carrier to negotiate the most competitive rates and charges possible. In doing so, you retain control over your business and vendor relationships, and have the agility to grow your business and portfolio quickly as new products enter the market. - Cost efficiencies
Automating internal processes and streamlining back-end processes is paramount to reducing operational expenditure (OPEX) for businesses of all sizes but particularly critical to the success of small to medium service providers.If your billing system doesn’t support a hybrid product portfolio with all product lines (current and future) in the one solution and requires parallel systems or duplicate invoicing to the one customer, then you’re losing precious revenue on sales.What’s more, any inefficiencies in your billing process can potentially add up to big issues causing revenue leakage and impacting customer retention.
- Reduced risk
In a market flooded with choice where consumers can switch providers at the drop of a hat, service providers need the flexibility to offer variety along with comparative pricing plans. Ensuring your business sales strategy and internal systems and processes can support a multi-carrier environment is therefore critical to customer retention and growth.As well as offering a wide range of services and competitive pricing, service providers at the top of the market know that quality technical support and bill clarity is also important to consumers. Billing needs to be accurate and timely to mitigate the risk of losing money and an increase in customer complaints.A legacy billing system (or lack of integration) can also hinder your chances of rapidly launching a new service to get ahead of the competition.
Partner with a carrier neutral billing provider upfront and you’ll protect your future business
At Outworks, we understand the benefits of neutrality and have made it our business strategy to remain carrier-agnostic. We’ll work with you to build an intelligent billing solution that produces consolidated invoices across multiple product and service lines from any number of carriage suppliers.
You specify how you want rating, tariffing and discounting to work and we’ll apply the algorithms accurately to align with your customer tiers or configurations.
We’ll also do the background reconciliation on supplier charge rates to make sure you’re charged as per the agreed transaction model and not losing any money on services.
Contact Outworks today to discover how our billing specialists can help future-proof your back-end processes.