Most cloud & communications providers use multiple price books to keep track of their product and service offerings. For example:
- A CSP (Communications Service Provider) may use Residential, Business and Wholesale price books for each market segment; a single product (such as 100mpbs Business Internet) may have a different price in each price book. Also, some products may only be available in certain markets (represented by different price books).
- A colocation / private cloud provider may have different pricing based on the region (e.g., North America EMEA).
- Short-lived, promotional price books can be created for select products.
- E-commerce and on-line sales may have different pricing than traditional sales.
A single customer account can purchase products and services from different price books. The pricing in individual price books may not only differ for new products, but also for add-ons and service requests.
Supporting multiple price books for new product sales is bread and butter CRM functionality. However, the problem arises for add-ons and changes, product replacements or moves (for location-based products) and service cancellations (in the telecom world, these are collectively referred to as MACDs).
This not only pertains to pricing, but to work order templates used – for example, a service cancellation workflow may be different for residential vs. B2B price book.
Nextian Quote-to-Cash supports all complexities mentioned above by adding the following fields to the standard Price Book object:
- Is Portal Pricebook – Indicates the price book for Customer Portal on-line sales (only one price book can be set as the Portal Price Book).
- Is Default Pricebook – Indicates the default price book used by Nextian CPQ and Nextian Customer Portal. For example, for services that have been imported, and don’t have an associated price book, the default price book will be used. Due to technical reasons the standard Salesforce Is Standard Price Book field could not be used.
In addition, the original Price Book used for service creation is saved on the service itself (the idea is to use a single price book throughout the service lifecycle). The following rules apply:
| Scenario | Price book selection |
|---|---|
| New product quote and order in the CRM | CRM user can select any price book, the default price book is pre-selected.
Price book is saved on the service once the service is created. |
| On-line new service order from the Customer Portal | Portal Price Book is used and saved on the new service once it is created. |
| Changes and cancellations from the CRM | CRM user can select any price book, the price book on the service is pre-selected (i.e., the price book that was used for service creation). |
| Changes and cancellations from the Customer Portal | The service price book is used if available, otherwise the default price book is used. |
