IP Applications Billing and Payments blog

Our last blog post dealt with our telecom billing heritage and the need for a strong rating engine if you want to handle the coming pricing models of cloud based applications. It turns out, a strong rating engine is only part of the story, and to our customers and prospects, quite often not the most interesting part.

It doesn’t matter where you start on the spectrum of monetization applications for subscription-based services and products, you have to do everything right to bring a subscription service to market.  As a “billing” company, prospective customers arrive on our doorstep looking for one or maybe two of the above.  The conversation warms up considerably when we talk about our whole range of capabilities. 

The Storefront gives subscribers a low-touch way to subscribe.  “Touch” is a weird variable in the business equation.  Regardless of the customer response, it costs money.  For some products, increasing touch increases satisfaction, but for many products it lowers it.  A well-designed self-service storefront can improve the customer’s experience as it reduces costs.  Subscribers like to set themselves up on your system because when they do it themselves, their name is spelled right, the products they want will be what they get, and they don’t have to worry about whether the stranger on the other end of a phone is going to steal their credit card number.  A clean and simple storefront improves customer satisfaction.   

The Admin Portal is how your company’s staff communicates with the system.  Through it they configure products, pricing plans, business rules and process workflows for your customer’s experience.  A well-designed Admin Portal connected to a comprehensive application provides tremendous flexibility.  Flexibility in defining pricing, product presentation and subscriber experience becomes increasingly valuable over time as product lines evolve and the customer base expands.   

The Rating Engine automates the financial administration of your business deals.  The Storefront and the Admin Portal are how the participants in a deal define the key business parameters.  Then, every billing cycle, the rating engine takes all that data about products, prices, taxes, currencies, subscribers and usage and computes an invoice.  Long-term contracts with variable terms, like subscriber counts or usage statistics are very difficult to bill accurately.  The rating engine doesn’t get bored, it doesn’t go golfing, it doesn’t take vacation, and it never forgets.   

The Payment Gateway, for those deals where payments are made by automated bank check or by credit card, is where money happens.  “Payment gateway” is a simple concept, but the actual implementation can be daunting because of its complexity.  Moving money around is done by banks and credit card issuers, and they protect us and themselves with walls of bureaucracy and risk mitigation strategies.  Your choice of business model has a powerful influence over how long it takes to get set up and your long-term costs of doing business.  The payoff to all the challenges is that once the setup and testing is complete, money “just happens” every billing cycle.   

There is a lot more detail behind a complete subscription commerce business, and that becomes evident as new customers work through the onboarding checklist we’ve developed over the last decade.  The good news is that once that detailed work is done, you have a smooth-running and efficient subscription business system that supports your products, your business model and your subscribers.