Now more than ever, utilities want to simplify their billing, and bill all their products and services on the same bill – regardless of the source of the product or service. Now, that’s even easier to do.
Standard utility services include line charges, consumption (at various pricing tiers), maintenance or other service charges. Recently, utilities have begun including other services to increase their market reach including communication, security and subscription services.
Even if you have multiple core systems generating transactions for different services, that shouldn’t hold you back from presenting a bill with all services included – especially if you have packaging such as bundling and other discounts for multiple services.
Offering multiple services significantly increases loyalty – which is crucial in this era of increased competition.
Studies show, and indeed our customers have proven, that increasing the number of services customers purchase increases their “stickiness” or loyalty with each new service added.
Many billing offerings struggle to manage this level of complexity – so it’s a great advantage to choose one that does this easily. Choose one with a history of sophisticated billing as well as flexible implementation, either as your platform of choice, or augmenting your existing core systems with the necessary flexibility and agility.
You don’t want to have to change core systems unnecessarily – it’s better to use a solution that integrates easily with your existing investments and leverages them with additional functionality. Of course, if you need a total solution replacement, that shouldn’t be a problem either.
Increasingly, there are opportunities for new services like sub-metering, but most downstream organisations that want to take advantage of this have little experience in billing utility services.
Further, they inevitably want to address additional services and bill those at the same time. Property management organisations for example, might want to bill rentals, maintenance, and all the utility services (electricity, water and gas). Rarely will they have either the experience or the tools to do this effectively.
Utilities are in a prime position to assist with these requirements. They can offer a complete billing service that delivers all these features, including the management of on-billing at multiple tiers within the sub-metered development.
It’s an attractive opportunity to offer this service quickly, with minimal set-up and implementation, and one that even with an attractive price, delivers you a growing profit stream.
At Utility and IoT Billing Solutions – part of the Select Software Group – we deliver solutions that manage all these requirements – as a fully outsourced service, a managed in-house service, a service you run yourself and we support, or any preferred hybrid of these.
This partner content is brought to you by Utility and IoT Billing Solutions. For more information, visit www.IoT-Billing.com.
