The need for cloud services is increasing every day with a large number of businesses opting to migrate to the cloud. This brings increased market share and revenue opportunities for Cloud Solution Providers. To sustain the growing business, CSPs need to focus on a great customer experience. For this, they need to expand their portfolio, offer flexible licensing and payment options, etc.
Many CSPs use manual billing and invoicing systems where they generate a separate invoice for each order and use spreadsheets to track payments. With a large client base, more services, multiple payment options, and other overheads, it becomes both operationally and financially difficult to manage the billing and payment collection manually. CSPs need to automate their billing and invoicing systems to drive and sustain growth.
Eliminate the complexities
Cloud billing has never been simple. Different customers opt for varying subscription-based services, choose different billing cycles, purchase additional services or licenses in the middle of their billing cycle. Added to this is the challenge of keeping up to date with the rapidly changing Microsoft prices and policies. Managing the billing manually can lead to inaccurate or delayed invoicing, revenue leakages and put an increased burden on administrative costs and operational inefficiencies for the CSPs.
Cross-sell and upsell
Billing automation tools can help CSPs package and bundle products and services and sell them at a discounted price as well as offer their own value add. A bundled offering simplifies the customer’s life as they are provided with a complete solution. It also gives them peace of mind as they know that if they suddenly need a different product or more licenses, they won’t have to place a new order and pay more. Offering innovative packages with discounts and offers can lead to a competitive advantage and help increase the market share of the CSPs. By automating the billing process, setting, and managing the pricing of bundled services becomes easier.
Improve customer experience
Billing automation allows customers to manage the purchases on their own. They have the flexibility of choosing their subscription services, billing cycles, payment mode, etc. Customers can have a comprehensive view of their subscriptions, billing, and payment details in one place. This provides them easy access to invoices, receipts, and credit/debit notes 24/7 which can help them in managing their ledger better. With billing automation software customers can receive timely invoices which can help them plan their payments.
Impact on the billing and accounts team
Manually managing the billing and payment collection of a large number of customers can be a tedious task for the accounts team. Manual billing can lead to over/under-invoicing, raising billing with wrong discounts leading to loss of revenue and poor customer experience. Billing automation tools can provide timely invoices which are in sync with the latest Microsoft pricing. When these tasks are taken care of by a billing tool it leads to the billing and accounts team having more time to focus on other tasks such as the timely resolution of customer queries and issues.
Start your automation journey
Using a CSP automation platform such as C3 will enable cloud providers to manage their billing and accounts functions easily by automating repetitive tasks. Ascertain error free, timely invoicing in sync with the frequently changing pricing with automation tools to accelerate growth as a CSP.
This blog was originally published on CSP Control Center.
