How to Increase Your VoIP Business Revenue with Intelligent Billing Plans

Selling a service to a potential customer is an art. Unlike products which can be seen and felt physically, services can not be experienced without purchasing. So, the strategies to sell a service is more of an art. Any potential customer will always compare the prices with other competitors in the market and try to negotiate hard with you or push you to reduce your prices. So, even if you offer high quality and prompt support, they are are not easily perceived by a potential customer. Nevertheless, you can overcome your competition and convince your customer with clever and intelligent billing plans that are attractive for customers and profitable for your business.

Kolmisoft MOR offers a variety of billing methods giving your business an opportunity to create intelligent billing plans. For the sake of convenience, we shall discuss them in the Kolmisoft MOR terminology.

Tariffs

Tariffs are the rate plans that you get billed by your provider, or you charge your customers. You can create two types of customer related tariffs –

• Wholesale tariffs for customers where you could easily create tariffs with some overage such as flat 10% on the top of providers pricing or 0.01 on the top of providers pricing. Such flat overage is not always convenient. For low priced destination 10% increase is not at all profitable. In contrast, for the high priced destination, 10% might result in a steep hike. So, you have to selectively add the overage.
• Retail tariffs for customers is where you have less traffic but a decent profit. It is here, you can play around connection charges, increments, minimal time for higher revenue.

Bundles & Subscriptions

Pay as you go pricing based on tariffs is useful in businesses where customers might call across various destinations and need access to countries across the world. However, most of the retail traffic or small businesses require access to fewer destinations only.  Such clients might need access to a specific country (India, USA, Ghana, Germany, Finland, Mexico etc., ) or a group of countries (Maghreb, Europe, Middle East, USA & Canada etc.,) and some need exclusive access to Landlines only or Mobiles only. In such cases, you need features to deploy exclusive deals for specific countries or a group of countries or for Landlines and/or Mobiles only.

Kolmisoft MOR facilitates launching of special bundles or monthly subscriptions through its robust billing platform. Here is the brief summary about how to launch such specific bundles/subscriptions –

1. Periodic fee plans: In Kolmisoft MOR one can create recurring billing plans with a defined period fee. Such plans are useful in offering monthly plans such as DIDs, IVRs, Queue or any other such add on services. You may also offer unlimited calling to certain destinations under this option.
   • Example 1: A customer subscribing to a DID could be billed using periodic fee plan
   • Example 2: A customer choosing an unlimited calling to USA mainland could be billed using periodic fee
2. One time fee plans: One-time fee plans are useful in billing a customer for occasional tasks such as setting up of some equipment, consulting, troubleshooting or any add on services that do not have a recurring cost to your business.
   1. Example 1: Setup charges for a DID
   2. Example 2: One hour on site support charge for troubleshooting.
3. Flat Rate services: Certain services need to be billed every month irrespective of the day they start. Flat rate services are a good option for such billing. It also offers you a great feature to create so called Unlimited calling plans (with a secret limit on the number of minutes). The advantage of these plans is to tweak the rounding of calls and can also define the expiration month.
   • Example 1: You can offer USA unlimited calling (with a limit of 3000 minutes per month) rounded every 6 seconds. Customer will be billed on 1st of every month
   • Example 2: You can offer EU unlimited landline calling (with a limit of 5000 minutes) rounded every 1 second. Customer will be billed on 1st of every month
4. Dynamic Flat rate services: Sometimes you have to bill your customer only on a specific day of each month on a recurring basis. Dynamic Flat rate services is a perfect option for such purpose. It offers every functionality as in Flat rate services along with an ability to bill on a specific date.

1. • Example 1: You can offer India unlimited calling (with a limit of 2000 minutes per month) @ 20 USD where every call is rounded by 30 sec. Customer can be billed on any particular day every month.

Additionally, you may also offer Pay as you go billing service that also offers great flexibility such as additional connection charge or a variable rounding of the call.

With so many options for billing, any VoIP business could create a variety of billing plans that are attractive to the end customers and profitable for the business.

Have you created such plans with MOR? Share your ideas.