Implementing Quote-to-Cash for Broadband Internet Providers with Salesforce and Nextian

Broadband Internet is the most popular form of Internet access in the US with approximately 60% of the residential market share.

It is also gaining popularity for business customers, especially as a secondary/backup link, particularly in conjunction with new technologies like SD-WAN.

Broadband internet offers high speed data transfers at low cost and is provided using various technologies including DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), cable and lately, fiber-optic and wireless.

While the underlying access technologies have been around for a while and do not pose major problems, service providers are facing back-office and B/OSS challenges including:

Limited ability to quickly generate customer quotes with confirmed service locations
Quoting limited to presenting new products only and not capable of handling changes to existing subscriptions (changes, add-ons, upgrades, replacements, etc.)
Expensive and feature-lacking multi-channel customer self-service with quoting, orders status, service management, ticketing and bill pay
Long product rollout cycles

This post describes how Nextian can help Broadband Internet Providers with overcoming these challenges using Salesforce as a platform.

The traditional quote-to-cash (QTC or Q2C) model

Before diving into new approaches to QTC, let’s take a look at the traditional model employed by service providers:

CRM ←→ CPQ → Order Processing → Billing → ERP/Financial

Let’s take a look at what happens between CRM opportunity and customer bill:

— An opportunity is logged in the CRM by a sales rep.
— At this stage, the rep will switch over to a CPQ package; configure products requested by the customer, their pricing, discounts, etc., eventually producing a quote file (usually a PDF) sent for customer signature. The rep will also update numbers on the opportunity, as well as other data points such as products quoted, number of locations, etc.
— Once the customer accepts the quote (usually after a few iterations), the opportunity is Closed Won and the quote/order paperwork is passed to the order processing system (automatically or swivel-chaired).
— Order processing system controls the delivery.
— At some stage, quoted services become billable and the billing system is triggered (the same usually applies to commissions — although they may be paid in part upon order received, after the turn up, and/or as a recurring fee for the subscription lifetime).
— Eventually invoices/transactions from the billing system end up in the financial ledger.

This model has a number of limitations:

The product catalog has to be replicated in multiple systems which causes synchronization challenges.
There are multiple integration points and bottlenecks (e.g., revenue forecasting requires updating opportunity with the latest quote numbers) and integrations are expensive to build, maintain and are error-prone.
Enabling e-commerce and customer self-care requires integration of data from multiple systems inflating development and maintenance costs.
Slow product rollout (from conception to when a can be quoted, delivered & billed) due to multiple systems involved.
Limited cross-departmental information access — for example. account managers are not able to see delivery progress, as they usually work within the CRM without access to delivery/project management systems. This leads to a considerable communication overhead within the business.

These limitations cause problems for the business

The traditional model is expensive to build and maintain
It inherently introduces process inefficiencies leading to higher than needed operational costs (more staff required)
Poor user experience leading to churn and/or lower sales

Improving the traditional model

Generally, service providers try to mitigate these limitations using two methods: systems integration and in-house development:

Method	Pros	Cons
Systems Integration (SI) — use commercial off-the-shelf packages and integrate them either via an ESB (Kafka, Apache MQ) or other SI method.	Standard software packages used — maintenance is vendors’ responsibility, no cost of software development and testing.	A substantial cost of building and maintenance (systems upgrades, APIs and data format changes, etc.) Many integration projects fail. Lack of desired functionality in the commercial off-the-shelf packages.
In-House Development — use own development team to build required systems in-house.	No integration required. Tailored features meeting business requirements.	Substantial cost of in-house development & testing, long delivery cycles, costly maintenance — sustainable only for large providers.

Most providers use a combination of these two methods.

Conclusions

To address the challenges outline above, the number of systems/silos has to be reduced. Most importantly opportunity, product catalog, quoting and service management must be consolidated as it is not possible to quote service changes (a.k.a. MACDs) without access to customer service inventory. It is also difficult to add other types of multi-dimensional quoting or approval factors such as payment history, current revenue, currently purchased service types, etc.

A different approach — Lead-To-Cash

Lead-to-cash is, in essence, a quote-to-cash model where CRM plays the central role (hence the ‘lead’ in the name) and other systems are built around it

Salesforce is well positioned for lead-to-cash implementations:

It is an extremely flexible and customizable system, which is also a programming platform (custom objects, APEX, Lightning, etc.)
It has a rich ecosystem of apps both from Salesforce and 3rd party vendors (such as Nextian) spanning the entire QTC continuum

The following sections describe some aspects how Salesforce can support QTC for Broadband providers.

Support for residential customers

Historically, CRMs have been used for B2B sales and while Salesforce is primarily a B2B product, it is also capable of handling residential accounts via a ‘Person Account’ type. By default, ‘Person’ accounts are disabled and have to be enabled by the Salesforce support. Once enabled, Salesforce is perfectly capable of handling residential services.

Residential broadband service in Salesforce

Quoting/CPQ

One of the strong suits of Salesforce is CPQ — both their own CPQ as well as third party packages available on AppExchange.

As mentioned earlier, one of the key challenges with subscription quoting is the ability to handle re-terms, re-rates, upgrades, moving services across locations or even replacing them. This is not possible in the CPQ engine without access to the service inventory.

For example, Nextian builds on top of service inventory and vanilla Salesforce CRM to enable quoting of all operations available during subscription life cycle.

Nextian Quote summary - new, replace, re-term and cancel line items on one quote — Nextian Quote summary – new, replace, re-term and cancel line items on one quote

In addition, Nextian also supports handling of service requests (e.g., perform a security audit on my subscription) as well as traditional ‘widget’ sales.

Subscription service inventory and life-cycle management

Unfortunately, Salesforce does not have a built-in ‘service’ object for representing cloud and communications customer subscriptions/services such as virtual machines, internet access, cloud backups, etc. (the contract object is a good basis for representing user agreements and T&Cs, but not individual services/subscriptions — see notes on contract management below).

Fortunately, service object can be built as a custom object — in fact, this is one of the few custom objects added by Nextian.

Delivery and provisioning

Salesforce offers multiple options for order delivery implementation: form simple tasks through process builder, work orders all the way up to complex third-party project management packages available form AppExchange.

Nextian implements work orders that are coupled with CPQ (each product definition contains work order definition for delivery) and order processing (work orders are created for order line items based on product definitions).

In addition to advanced scheduling and forecasting for manually executed tasks, Nextian offers code tasks for automating the provisioning process with zero-touch-provisioning as the ultimate goal. Technically, code tasks are APEX code snippets that can reach out via REST or other APIs & protocols to other systems — it is up to a workflow designer to determine if provisioning orchestration takes place in Salesforce or elsewhere.

Customer support

Customer support in Salesforce is based on built-in case objects, which can be used as trouble tickets. Just like with the CPQ, many implementation options are available to make cases usable for cloud and communications services support:

Customize, vanilla case objects
Use Service Cloud cases (these offer a lot of additional functionality like SLAs, Entitlements, Chatter, etc.)
Use a third-party package from AppExchange

Nextian uses the first approach, adding service and account context (service, product, location, account, revenue & profit, etc.). to either vanilla CRM or Service Cloud cases.

Salesforce case with service and account financial information

Billing & finance

At Nextian we recommend keeping billing / finance outside Salesforce (this seems to be a common practice for the industry).

This especially holds true when voice bundles come into the mix, with usage-based billing, CDR (Call Data Record) processing, etc.

What we recommend though, is to integrate invoice and payment history back into Salesforce, keeping existing billing/ERP.

E-commerce / Self-care portals

Generally, the following approaches are possible:

Keep the portal outside (but integrated with) Salesforce on one hand, and Billing & Finance on the other
Pull all the required information into either system and create a single portal integration
If all data is pulled into Salesforce, using Salesforce Communities is an option

Customer portal architecture is typically determined on an individual case basis.

Contract management

Salesforce offers a standard contract object that can be further customized. At Nextian, we recommend customizing it on a per case basis (it is not, for example part of the Nextian package), because it is difficult to generalize. The following need to be considered:

Standard terms & conditions vs. special contracts
One-off terms
Single contract per account or multiple contracts (e.g., per product)
Handling of account mergers

Taking it further — network integration and upgrades

So far, only the BSS part of B/OSS has been discussed. It is however worth noting, that bringing service information from the network into the CRM can greatly improve account management, sales and increase user experience. For example, Nextian brings availability, operational status, outage and upgrade information directly into the CRM:

Conclusions

Salesforce is an excellent ecosystem for end-to-end business management for cloud and communications service providers, offering:

Reduced TCO
- Consolidated platform/fewer integrations
- Ecosystem spanning the entire quote-to-cash continuum
Reduced CAPEX
- Rapid development/smaller expense per feature
- Ability to leverage a versatile ecosystem
Quicker time-to-market
- Rapid deployment of new products
Improved user experience
- 360° view of the customer in the CRM (services, revenue, case, payments, operational status, etc.)
- Relatively easy to implement multi-channel user support & self-care

Nextian is a vendor of Quote-to-Cash (QTC) software for cloud and communications helping providers accelerate growth and increase customer lifetime value.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you!

Implementing Quote-to-Cash for Broadband Internet Providers with Salesforce and Nextian

The traditional quote-to-cash (QTC or Q2C) model

These limitations cause problems for the business

Improving the traditional model