COVER STORY 01732 759725 32 COVER STORY In response to rapidly evolving consumer habits and increasing end customer demand for selfservice options, Union Street has launched Billnow, a white-labelled billing portal that integrates with its market leading aBILLity platform. Managing Director, Vincent Disneur, explains how Billnow will help resellers enhance their customer service offering and empower their customers with greater options for managing services and billing. Over the last few years, there has been a major shift in the way we work. As a result, a number of B2B customer service trends have emerged that are influencing customer expectations and redefining what it means to provide a high-quality service and experience. Union Street serves over 950 MSPs and providers of ICT services and through regular consultations with our partners, we have noted a general trend towards the consumerisation of B2B customer service. Business users are quickly coming to expect the same levels of service they get in their personal lives, with their work interactions. They increasingly expect fast turnarounds, more ways of communicating, and they want to be able to do more for themselves without having to call or email the MSP for assistance. As such, MSPs are looking for tools which can be provided to the end customer, putting information directly into their hands and empowering their self-service experience. This presents a fantastic opportunity for forward thinking MSPs to differentiate themselves by providing tools that give end customers greater control of their services and options. The goal for the channel should be to enhance the customer experience by making it easy for end customers to interact with their MSP at the right time and in the most appropriate way. Taking all this into account, we set to work on developing Billnow, a billing portal that will help MSPs meet the demand for self-service options from their end customers and partners whilst simultaneously reducing the cost of service. The Billnow portal works by drawing data directly from our aBILLity billing platform, enabling customers to view up to the minute changes in their service usage and conduct their own reporting. It can also enable end customers to make changes to their services such as SIM swaps, check associated networks and SIM numbers themselves, and setting bars for certain services. Our user experience architects have worked hard to ensure the Billnow portal features a user-friendly, modern design, optimised to ensure ease of use for end customers and partners. Each instance of the Billnow portal can be customised and white-labelled with an MSP’s own logos and colour scheme for a consistent look and feel with their brand. Billnow also offers opportunities to promote new products and services or to make announcements with prominently placed advertising panels within the portal. The customer experience is greatly enhanced by enabling end customers to monitor and manage services at their convenience. Not only will Billnow serve as a value add for MSPs and help to keep customers sticky, but it will also help reduce inbound calls and enquiries, lowering the cost of service by empowering end customers to help themselves. Help end customers to help themselves Vincent Disneur
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