Leveraging Billing Automation for Agile CSP Business

The increasing need for instant access accompanied by the rise in remote work in the past few months has exponentially accelerated the demand for cloud computing solutions. While this sudden growth came as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is expected to continue in the near future. This increased demand comes as a great opportunity for cloud service providers or CSPs to acquire new customers, increase their sales pipeline and impact their bottom line. However, the dual need to focus on servicing existing customers as well as new customer acquisition is creating a strain and pressure on team members. This blog will focus on how adoption of billing automation can enable CSPs to build agile and resilient CSP business.

Turning opportunity into value

The natural course to service increased demand has been the addition of new team members to the bandwagon to manage new acquisitions and large purchase volumes. But building bigger teams to effectively handle the sudden surge can be extremely time consuming and resource intensive. While on one hand, finding the right talent with the skills and competencies in the cloud services domain is difficult. On the other hand, training them to seamlessly service and acquire customers requires months if not years and considerable bandwidth. Fortunately, CSPs can leverage billing automation to turn this opportunity of increased demand and create organization-wide value and impact. On a macro level, automation can ensure the increased load of billing, invoicing, servicing, etc. are taken care of in an accurate, error free and reliable manner. In addition to a short-term and quick solution to increased demand, billing automation can help ascertain business continuity even in times of uncertainty by helping build agile and resilient businesses.

Towards agility and resilience with billing automation

Let us quickly move on to the specific applications of billing automation which create a clear case of how it contributes to building business agility and resilience.

• Automated invoicing: A billing automation platform can help CSP create and send itemized invoices to their expanding customer base, considering licenses and usage-based purchases. Automated invoicing will not be affected by an increase in the business size and will effectively service any expansion and changes in the businesses, promoting agility.

• Dynamic capabilities: Billing automation platforms come with dynamic capabilities which have the potential to withstand changes and display resilience. Be it changes in Microsoft pricing or changing market conditions, a billing automation platform like C3 can automatically adapt to the developments.

• An integrated dashboard: A billing automation platform like C3 can help CSP get an integrated view of the entire customer lifecycle. Conventionally, when different teams work in silos, there is a gap in large-scale servicing, which can be bridged by an automation solution.

• Customer self-service: Billing automation solution comes with a provision to offer self-service capabilities to the end users to directly manage their licenses and usage. In addition to serving the need of new customers to take charge and ensure instant gratification, self-service can also considerably reduce the pressure on team members to manually accept order requests.

• Levelled playing field: While as a CSP there is stiff competition in the market, anyone starting as a new CSP can also compete even with the oldest Microsoft Partners and promise customers the same quality of services.
• Customized partner offers: Microsoft Partner Center has limitation on offering only Microsoft products and services, while C3 can provide the partners a platform to offer managed services, quantify them and have a billing mechanism in place to invoice the customers with just a few clicks.

In a nutshell, it is clear that billing automation is a one stop solution for CSPs to facilitate business expansion and acquire new customers without worrying about servicing them from billing standpoint. With a billing automation platform like C3, CSPs can automate the entire purchase and billing cycle, making it resilient to market dynamics and complexities. It helps Cloud Solution Providers in reducing  dependency between Billing Team size and customer demands helping grow business of any size effectively and efficiently. If you want to learn more about how C3 can help you scale your CSP business and skyrocket your growth, book a demo today!

This Blog was originally published on CSP Control Centre.