How to Accelerate Growth by Empowering Channels and Increasing Customer Satisfaction
by Matt Austin
Ensuring quality customer service through a channel sales model can be challenging. The needs of resellers and end customers generate demand for more complex product offerings, pricing models and billing options. Establishing the organizational structure, in terms of both personnel and technology, is critical to taking advantage of emerging opportunities in the marketplace. Once a business has solved those challenges, they can generate exponential growth.
Sales & Pricing
If you’re in sales trying to quickly and accurately provide pricing to prospects and existing clients as a channel partner, you may run into multiple roadblocks. Many of these issues stem from not having the proper infrastructure in place for managing pricing, especially in consumption or usage-based economies. If customers feel that pricing packages are not designed to meet their specific use cases, they’ll move on to the next prospective provider who can offer such a level of personalization.
In an environment where customers expect personalization, channel partners need the ability to remain flexible in their price offerings. Many legacy systems do not offer the level of flexibility required, limiting the potential of channel partners. However, with a platform designed with channel partners and their pricing needs in mind, businesses can enable channels to become a main driver of growth and customer acquisition.
Product Management
Another challenge businesses can run into with channel partners has to do with product management and provisioning. Imagine your company is capable of meeting emerging trends and demands of the market for a product or service, but your catalogue management infrastructure is not capable of delivering such a product or service in a way that is easily reconcilable. Not only can this create inefficiencies in revenue recognition, it may thwart the ability to offer the service entirely. What we have is a recipe for hindering growth. At the very least, the inability to offer dynamic catalogues will decrease customer satisfaction.
On the other hand, if channel partners have the power to manage product catalogues, they become chameleon-like in offering a slew of personalized packages tailored to customer needs. Channel partners are able to adapt with the needs of the market, rarely having to tell their clients, “No.” This autonomy in product management has additional benefits: the feedback generated from channel partners in managing products provides data about market trends. You can begin to offer the same options to in-house accounts, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing churn.
Billing & Revenue
Billing managers can become frustrated with legacy systems for managing channel partners. Often, they’re left performing financial gymnastics to complete their month end close. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
One of the best ways to empower channel partners is to break down barriers to processes like pricing and product management. In doing so, the lives of billing managers become much easier. In solving challenges related to pricing and product management, channel partners can expedite sales and customer acquisition. This means channel partners can more quickly achieve growth in their accounts. In the end, billing managers realize greater revenue recognition thanks to improved processes that otherwise slowed growth. Ultimately, billing managers will find that financial reconciliation is much more efficient when channel partners are empowered.
A Platform for Pricing, Products, and Billing
It is critical to have a centralized platform that coordinates product definition, pricing, and order fulfillment through financial reconciliation. For each of the scenarios depicted above, BluLogix can offer a solution. Our BluIQ platform is designed to solve complex billing scenarios. We offer a seamless quote-to-cash process, complex mediation, dynamic catalog management, and consumption and usage-based billing.
Solving these challenges will ultimately lead to improved customer satisfaction. In today’s business world, customers demand flexibility. With an increased emphasis on flexibility, businesses need to remain agile in their operations and provisioning. Fast, accurate pricing and dynamic product catalogs are hallmarks of agile business practices. Of course, accurate billing is critical to customer satisfaction. Finally, these capabilities need to be extended to channel partners to maximize their contributions and drive growth. BluIQ offers the financial reconciliation capabilities needed to smoothly and accurately address all of these challenges.
