Driving growth: 4 ways smart CSPs are using their bills to increase innovation success

CSPs are busy finding new ways to monetize 5G, develop new products, create new business models, and open up new revenue streams. Bill Specialist Rob Vos looks at how the bill can increase the commercial success of their innovation efforts and support revenue growth.

CSPs are investing billions of dollars in designing and building new products. But, according to the authors of the world’s largest pricing survey, Simon-Kucher & Partners, 72% of new products introduced in the past five years have either failed entirely or have failed to meet their financial goals. 

Maximizing the potential of investments - transforming technical innovation into successful commercial innovation – has never been more important, and CSPs must use all the tactics at their disposal to do so. Here are 4 ways smart CSPs are utilizing their bills to support innovation, success and unlock value add.

Tactic 1: ensure bills support rapid innovation

On average, adding even the simplest product to the bill takes 6 to 9 months because making changes to legacy BSS isn’t easy. Billing needs to become far more agile so that innovative new products, price plans, and offers become easier to roll out, and CSPs can more readily respond to evolving customer needs and competitive offers. Having an infrastructure that supports the monetization of new products in a matter of weeks, is vital to outcompete rivals and keep offers fresh and relevant. Involving billing at an early stage of product conception can help avoid delays in adding new products to bills. Calvi Polaris is instrumental in delivering this level of agility in the bill presentment domain - supporting rapid innovation by giving CSPs control of their own bills and reducing the delays and costs incurred when CSPs are reliant on third parties.

Tactic 2: Use the bill to support customer understanding of innovation

Once a customer has subscribed to a new product or offer, CSPs need to ensure their billing experience matches the warm, welcoming and exciting feeling experienced during the sales pitch. Currently, most billing experiences do the opposite. Prorated new products, price plans, and bundles can be confusing for customers because there’s a lot of information they need to absorb. This confusion translates into more support costs and customer frustration.

As we enter a period of rapid innovation, CSPs are challenged with anticipating customer confusion and using their bills to proactively help customers navigate change. Ensuring they provide clear explanations of new price plans and bundles, Terms and Conditions, and entitlements is essential in avoiding unnecessary support costs and gives customers the confidence to adopt innovation more readily.  Novel techniques, such as video billing, are an extremely effective way of reducing confusion and increasing satisfaction. After implementing a personalized first bill video to explain why certain elements were highlighted on the bill, one of Calvi’s customers saw bill-related calls to its Customer Care team decrease by 36%.

Tactic 3: Use bill data to promote innovation through personalized offers

If done right, the bill can be used to upsell products and services. Doing so successfully requires CSPs to break out of an organizational-centric campaign-based selling mindset and move towards a customer-centric context-based selling one –by providing information about new products and offers that are relevant to customers. The bill aids this process as it offers a valuable and effective method of communicating new personalized offers and products to mid-lifecycle customers, thereby encouraging and speeding adoption.

Tactic 4: Using bills as a strategic asset

As CSPs adopt new business models – particularly on the B2B side  – bills have a strategic role in their future success. Charging end customers and co-creating value with partners is not a simple undertaking but, with their investment in both billing and customer support, it’s one that CSPs are uniquely placed to address as they become embedded in new B2B verticalized ecosystems and move towards platform-based business models. To be ready for future innovation, however, CSPs need to shift their mindset, rethink their position and alter their approach towards partners. They need to see vendors as partners with whom they can co-develop exciting new products for their enterprise and SME customers. From a billing point of view, they need to consider how to provide insight to partners on what they owe and what is owed to them – turning the bill from a uni-directional statement of usage to a bidirectional statement of value add.

Billing can either roadblock and stand in the way of rapid innovation or play a strategic role in supporting CSPs’ commercial innovation goals. CSPs that have agile and flexible billing capabilities have the opportunity to play a vital and profitable role in emerging B2B ecosystems and platform business models and are well primed to open up attractive new revenue streams.

Curious how billing can support CSP innovation and unlock the power of your bill? Contact us today and chat with one of our Calvi bill specialists. 

Recently we hosted a webinar with Aria,
check out our on-demand webinar to learn more about co-creation.