Customer and Billing in focus …

The new cloud delivery model of IT puts much more focus on the customer information, and how to charge / bill for the services.

The new economy that comes from online sales, but also from the fact that the customers are easier and easier to identify, and connect to a purchase. The customers use credit cards, and also every possible kind of loyalty card imaginable. This ever growing stream of information is a source of value that is very much unused.  With this information there are great opportunities to increase the sales in any enterprise, this has been known for many years and realized by IT systems called CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management systems) but it needs to be elaborated and built out with new and modern functionality. In a modern CRM system you have to classic information, what did the customer buy, when, in what store, maybe even some loyalty information. In addition to this it becomes essential to add information around where was the purchase done, this becomes essential when we add the online shopping dimension to any normal purchase. It is also great if you can add information from social media, like friends, their interest, the interest of the customer itself and more.

Adding this kind of information will open a new world of possibilities to sell more and better to the customers. And more sales equals (often) higher revenue and more profit.

As important as having control of your customers it is also essential to get control of the ways the customers pays; billing … Billing is rapidly moving from a cash with some credit card payments to more or less only credit card payments into a new world where you can pay also with your phone, with tokens earned in other ways through subscriptions or through loyalty.

Ease of billing/payment will of course result in more sales, but it is not as easy to just add functionality to handle the new way of settle the payment with, even if this is the first essential step for the enterprise. In the new world of internet it is also essential to handle the different personas of a customer, as well as the customers different ways of paying for items. With personas means the different types of personalities the customer have, private person, professional, mother, father, member of the swim team and more … It is quite safe to say that everyone have been out searching for something on the internet on behalf of your kids or in behalf of the local sports club you are active in, and then the preferred search engine company that you are using collects the fact that you now are suddenly very interested in information about blue-whales or quality of water purification systems. The next time you go online you will get this into your results … or suggestions … what is missing here is the fact that when you helped you kid with gathering information about the blue-whale you where actually searching with one of your personas. When this persona functionality available in the future it will enable even more possibilities to targeted sales. More and more of the sales these days are conducted over the internet channel, and there ease and secure payments becomes more and more important, and with the smartphone usage a new and obvious way of buying will be one of the prime choises of every customer; the mobile payment connected to either a mobile subscription or to a pre paid mobile number. Again the obvious need of personas bubble up to the surface; what if/when I only have my company cell phone on me and I need to buy a private-bus-ticket with a NFC or SMS payment?  This can sound like a stupid example, but it is a fact already in some places (Helsingborg, Sweden) where you can either buy pre-paid ticket cards in dedicated central places or if you do not have a pre-paid card or the pre-paid card is out of money you can only pay with SMS, no cash or no credit cards are accepted on the bus. So maybe a small dilemma, but still without a persona functionality attached to my company phone billing I can not use the bus. Then there are tons of interesting design and use interface challenges to solve everything, not to mention all the interesting algorithms in the background to keep the personas in control.

Sales functionality

The customers will over time not just expect to get better targeted offerings, but also more enhanced offerings based on the information and history gathered. Some classic ways of getting the customers to buy more is to bundle items and give a discount if you buy the bundle. Or buy three of one kind and get one for free. Or just get some percentage discount because you are a loyal customer. Or discount everything or a set of the items and call it a sale. In common for all of the above is that it is tied to one particular time or occation of buying, and to one store. Soon we will see new functionality; like bundling over stores, why would not inter company agreements and collaboration result in item bundling over the store boundaries? As a customer you would be interested in this, you have bought three bottles of fine wine, and as a bonus you get the possibility to bundle it with a plate of cheese that will be delivered by another company, but the bundle makes it attractive as an offering. Creating this kind of inter-company bundles also means that you will share customer information, either direct by simply sharing the customer information stored in the CRM system or indirect by the fact that when setting up the bundle the second company (the cheese company) will know that now the customer have bought a set of wines, and in particular also the type, and volume to be able to use their special knowledge, and recommend the correct type and volume of cheese.

The same principle of bundling will also be applied to the time dimension as we just did to the store dimension. Why would you only be allowed to get the benefits of the bundles if you buy everything at the same purchase? Why is not the bundle offering valid for 24 hours? a week? This is just because historically the selling company did not have the sales/customer information available. Now the technology exits to integrate CRM information in-between different customers, and of course independent of where the CRM system is deployed. It will have to be real time integration, and there will be challenges regarding master data, and or if it should be synchronization/copying of data or if you should allow lookups.

In the same way as always, there will be a need for both types of integrations. The synchronization scenario will be applicable for some companies, but then you have the giants of gathering customer information like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft who most likely will sell their gathered information with some kind of lookup functionality, and micro payments. The new players in this arena will be the telecom providers that will both provide customer information that is totally new to all companies, and they will also provide the a new way of billing for goods.

The new information that the telecom operator today have about their customers are a gold mine that is unused. Many people will start shouting about privacy issues and privacy laws, but end of the day that will be solved, and a lot of the information will be available for sales to companies that wants to use it. Information that can be provided is for example, location based information telling where and how the customers are moving, either in real time, or in patterns. This can be used in real time by companies to send out real time marketing offers to potential or loyal customers passing buy a physical store or other place. It can also be used to buy sets of information, for example the top thousand persons that most times during a month passes close to a certain restaurant. Other type of information that the telecom operators are in possession of is the customer internet surfing habits, all surfing on smart phones, and more and more also with mobile broad band connections to lap tops and tablets is passing through the telecom network, and is tagged to a user. (not if the user using a wireless connection)

The other functionality that the telecom operators bring to the party is the functionality of easy billing, every online surfing transaction is as stated above going through the telecom networks, and is in touch with the telecom billing system to constantly determine if the data is allowed. This can be either a subscription that will be invoiced to the customer, or it can be a pre-paid usage, and then need to be constantly monitored.

This functionality can be integrated into both online, and into normal shopping through NFC or SMS payments, and also the same when it comes to online payments, you can use the fact that your telecom operator have some kind of contract with you. (pre or post paid)

What about the functionality behind, the complex combinations price setting parameters can become a real challenge if you need to code it from the beginning, and even if you have more than basic functionality, the borderless, time-less new era will make things extremely complex.

Borderless means to sell/use items from more than one provider in bundles or discount schemas, this will mean contracts in between suppliers, on how to split revenue, length of valid opportunities, history of purchases, and when combined with the timeless dimension also keeper of old non valid offerings.

Timeless means that an offering do not have to be valid just during one purchase activity. For example, if you have a discount offering of buy 3 get one for free, then you normally assume that you have to buy the three items at the same time, but it could be possible to allow patterns where you first buy one item, and then add two more another day (time limited in the offering) and get one for free. This would make the offering a timeless offering.

Where do we get this functionality, normally in a sales/ERP system, where the sales ledger have rich functionality. If we compare to a CRM system it do not always have the same rich sales functionality.

High level functionality needed;

• Customer information
• Purchase history
• Multi Currency
• Advanced Pricing functionality
• Agreements / Contracts
• Usage monitoring
• Tax, where is it sold?
• Inventory for physical items
• Supply chain management (delivery, order promises)
• Supplier items

The marketing, and sales functionality as well as customer service of the MS Dynamics CRM is key of course to improve and increase sales of any kind.

A quick look at this will first disqualify the MS Dynamics CRM product, and you get a feeling for that MS Dynamics AX would do the job. If you then take into consideration that AX also have a full solution for retail that most likely can be used here, even if you buy stuff online with you PC, or with you phone.

Very much of services that will be sold in the future are so called IT services, that is rather consumed online than being delivered, but in the same way as we added timeless and borderless to the new way of selling we will also see patterns where you buy a physical item, and get some IT services to consume. To make it even more interesting some of these services will be subscription based where you will get a volume of consumption every new time period, and there will be an end date to the subscription.

In the telecommunications world that have been standard for a while to sign up for a subscription of SMS, where you get for example 3000 SMS to spend during a month, and every new month it gets reset to the initial amount.

Other examples of consumption could be for example backup, where you either buy a subscription for a certain amount of storage that you pay a fixed price for each month, or you could easy visualize a scenario where you instead pay zero if you don’t backup anything, and then you pay for exactly what you use.

Here we get introduced to functionality that normally is not in a ERP system or a CRM system, but very common in the billing system of the telecom operator. So basically what we are thinking of is that we need to be able to integrate and use functionality [/ provision] from the billing system.

But end of the day, the customer (CRM information) is the main data object here, so the owner of the customer information can sell more. The new integration with the providers of customer information, interests, behavior, friends, etc, etc will be key to future success as well as integration to new payment mechanisms.