Billing and Customer Care: It’s What Will Launch IoT to the Next Level

The digital landscape is shifting dramatically with the Internet of Things (IoT) at the forefront, projecting to connect 40 billion devices by 2025. As service providers face a convoluted marketplace with increasing consolidation and network convergence, the need for sophisticated monetization tools becomes crucial.

Transforming Business Models: From Products to Services

IoT offers enterprises a golden opportunity to deepen customer relationships by transitioning from selling products to offering them as services. This shift demands a move from upfront capital expenses to recurring operational costs, facilitating clearer cost-value comparisons and lowering entry barriers for customers.

Challenges in Adopting Recurring Revenue Models

Transitioning to a service-based model introduces significant challenges, particularly in revamping back-office systems like billing, revenue management, and customer care to support recurring and usage-based billing. Enterprises often struggle with the lack of resources needed to undertake such transformations effectively.

Service Providers: The Untapped Potential

While service providers (whether it be a traditional telco, MVNO, or other IoT network provider) have excelled in network and device management, they frequently overlook the critical areas of real-time charging and customer support necessary for IoT success. Analysts suggest that integrating enhanced billing capabilities such as “Bill on Behalf”, split billing, and specialized customer care into IoT platforms could markedly improve service offerings.

Implementing Comprehensive IoT Strategies

By including the necessary catalog, billing, and customer care capabilities with a Service Provider’s IoT platform strategy, enterprises can then be equipped with all of the tools to:

• Automatically onboard subscribers through integrated device management and subscription billing capabilities.
• Differentiate in the market by quickly rolling out new value-added services through highly scalable, cloud-based systems.
• Advance the customer experience through integrated customer care portals, which allow customers to obtain a completely transparent view of their devices, their usage, invoices and self-manage their plans.

Ovum also reveals, “65% of telecommunications service providers have stated the need to develop new services as the biggest driver for their IoT project.” Unfortunately, the presence of a multitude of billing systems (60% of telcos have 50 or more systems, according to Ovum) lack the convergent capability to charge, bill, and settle with partners for multiple service types on a single invoice. In order for operators to think about Billing-as-a-Service, they likely will need to upgrade their billing systems.

The Path to IoT Mainstream Adoption

For IoT to truly make an impact and enhance profitability, service providers must upgrade and consolidate their billing systems to offer flexible, scalable solutions like white-label and bill-on-behalf services, paving the way for broader IoT adoption and revenue growth.