In business, it pays to be ahead of the game.
Success is built on three key things: keeping pace with your customers’ ever-evolving needs; knowing how to respond whenever they change; and partnering with provider organisations capable of helping you make it happen.
The Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) sector has exploded since the global pandemic – from once being all about telephony and desk phones to now powering the new, always-on, mobile-first world of integration, automation and artificial intelligence.
It’s all up there in the cloud; all in one place; all meshing seamlessly together to create slick communication experiences for customers and workforces alike.
In short, the digital revolution has changed everything.
Of course, with increased functionality comes increased complexity.
Many of today’s smart new services and applications are subscription-based or pay-as-you-go – the same commercially-efficient OpEX-centric factors which have helped enterprises everywhere capitalise on the epic UCaaS dividend.
For UCaaS providers keen to continue surfing the growth wave, having an awareness of how trends such as remote working and virtual team collaboration are likely to shape how those services and applications are procured, deployed and billed going forward is the new imperative.
Partnering with an expert is, as always, a very good call.
“Unified Communications will continue to evolve, and businesses need to be open to that ongoing evolution – it’s essential for those who rely on subscription-based products and services in particular to be aware of all the relevant trends,” says JK Chelladurai, Founder & CEO at leading global end-to-end revenue management experts OneBill, whose latest UCaaS Revenue Growth Study and accompanying whitepaper provides many of the answers.
“The growth in remote or hybrid working has been the key revenue driver for UCaaS providers over the last three years and that growth is expected to increase at a compound annual rate of 23.6% up to 2028. Therefore, it is imperative that UCaaS businesses are equipped with a billing and monetization platform that can help them launch and execute subscription pricing with ease.”
OneBill’s global study results are indeed eye-catching.
For example, more than 70% of workers said they prefer flexible work environments with remote options; instead of a raise, more than 6% of employees said they would prefer to work remotely; and there has been a 27% increase in the use of team messaging tools since the pandemic.
From the end-user enterprise perspective, the study showed that, for most, live chat is their customers’ preferred method of communication; SMS marketing is being used by 39% of businesses; and five minutes is the average response time for 58.7% of customers texted by their favorite brands.
However, the same study showed that the lack of an appropriate billing solution is one of the key barriers for UCaaS businesses upon which the continued success of those enterprises now depend.
Specifically, the OneBill study found the top five limitations of billing platforms to be: restriction on integration with other systems; inflexibile management of channel partners’ and agents’ commissions; lack of product ‘bundling’ flexibility; usage calculation complexity; and invoicing errors.
OneBill’s clever end-to-end revenue management platform does much to mitigate.
“Beyond billing, in recent years, we have seen a significant shift where customers are increasingly wanting product experiences that are more optimized, instantaneous, flexible, and streamlined,” says Chelladurai.
“That is why it is so important to provide a pay-per-use billing solution which accurately calculates usage to the very last decimal point and that is capable of remaining relevant, retaining existing customers, and attracting new ones.
“It is also important to offer a billing platform that can provide intelligent and meaningful reports which can propel analysis and decision making, and that is sufficiently scalable to accept the billions of revenue data required to do so.
“Also, the platform must satisfy the appropriate compliances, such as GDPR and PCI, and Two-Factor Authentication should also be a capability in order to scale-up security. Corporates will only become vendors to reliable providers on whose tools they can bank.
“With a passion to push the boundaries, we have established a dedicated innovation center where our product development experts are constantly finding new ways to optimize and leverage the OneBill platform to serve our customer needs today, and in the future.”
It’s certainly the case that pay-as-you-go, on-demand, hyper-personalization and AI-powered intelligent conversation are set to remain front and centre on the smarter organizations’ tech roadmaps.
And who knows what new trends may join them over the next few years,
Whatever the future might look like, it seems now really is the time for UCaaS providers to ensure they are properly plugged-in to the sharpest analysis of the most likely predictions.
Only then will they be able to provide what customers want, at the exactly the time they want it.
To learn more about how OneBill can help your and your customers’ businesses turn billing into something so much bigger, check out its whitepaper.
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