It's 2017... The IT Trend Has Changed... Time To Patch The Boat And Stop Investing In Expensive Bailing Buckets
SAN FRANCISCO, March 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Corporations are not asking about IOT, CPQ or Marketing help these days. What is on everyone's mind in the new subscription economy is to scale back, reduce manual practices, lower the cost of subscriber management, and take advantage of what they already have.
It's a shock, but companies want to just improve what is in front of them by offering their subscribers direct access to their own accounts through self-service.
Until recently the adoption of portals at the B2B level for Small Cap and SMB has been slow. Cloud security questions, prohibitive costs and the time/investment it takes to offer a well formed web self-service model was just not cost efficient and gave stigma of bad customer service. Instead, offshore call centers were relied upon. The result of attempts to offer voice-to-voice services at a cost effective rate caused the same poor result as the fears they were trying to avoid.
In 2017, things have changed, people are no longer afraid of Internet banking and web-based services to solve the complex needs for finance, telecommunications, service orders and change requests. Conversely, most people are less excited about calling call centers. Complaints about wait times, dealing with complex language challenges and unskilled labor are counter-productive to subscriber retention efforts.
Project priorities for heavy quoting systems or layer-cake style marketing systems have taken priority over the proliferation of manual processes. This anomaly happened because there was no need to invest in automation when a human was going to be required anyway.
Today we are being asked to engage in self-service portal projects to allow subscribers the ability to check accounts, their subscriptions, make changes, pay or reprint bills, upgrade, cross purchase and suspend their services along with checking their utilization. This has become the number one priority for both subscribers and corporations.
What we hear from our executive customers:
"We want to run an automated house where the client can interact with a website for their needs and not depend on my finance department or an account exec to answer basic questions. We want to take their results of their web usage and apply it to better service offerings and account interaction."
"The movement to self-service portal is the way we expect to reduce costs and increase service availability. Why shouldn't consumer-based models work effectively in the B2B space? It's the best proving ground."
There are still those trying to promote CPQ systems that are taking up to a year to deploy and a team of engineers to configure, only to have change of executive leadership throw them out as their first decision. Other vendors are pushing sales and marketing solutions, which have become luxuries to companies who need to reduce multi-system operations and cut their monthly capital expense. A well-formed project to establish self-service features, in-App notifications, and utilization reporting are the top requirements for 2017.
Adam Kleinberg
CEO of ChikPea Inc.
ChikPea is the first SRM solution suite on the Salesforce platform. Adam had been a specialist in subscription service automation for 11 years when he and Bhaskar Roy founded ChikPea. Prior to ChikPea, Adam was a pre-sales engineer at Siebel systems, specializing in the finance vertical and a 10 year Sr. Project Manager for Bank of America.
Company: ChikPea Inc.
Contact: Chris Nguyen
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.chikpea.com
SOURCE ChikPea Inc.
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