In a recent study, perceived price complexity has been shown to negatively affect customer perceptions of price fairness and influence their unified communications and collaboration (UCC) product choice. So why is that? It’s because customers negatively evaluate the transparency of the firm’s pricing practices and infer higher total prices. So, does it make sense for a service provider to carry the burden of complex costs from its suppliers as they invariably cause pass-through of complex pricing to their customers?
In the world of unified communications, most UC platform vendors offer very similar feature sets. Service providers are therefore looking to offer the most suited value while simplifying their offerings and gaining flexibility in how they approach their markets. The traditional approach taken by vendors who supply the UC platforms of billing per seat, and what seems like a line item charge per feature creates substantial complexity for service providers as they receive endless charges which they have to reconcile with their customers’ consumption and bill for. For an increasingly commoditised service, this is a waste of effort and extremely inflexible in terms of enabling service providers to adopt disruptive pricing models.
Offering similar features in an industry where average selling prices are dropping and 12X Spiffs are the norm, means service providers need to forget speeds and feeds as a form of feature differentiation. They need to start by looking at the macro trends in the industry where Google estimates, before the pandemic, showed that 80% of the global workforce is deskless. If the workforce is deskless why are service providers paying their vendors for seat-based licensing? netsapiens has over 1.3million users on its platforms and has seen on a global basis that, on average, only 4% of seats are active at any one time, so making use of this oversubscription is the focus of service providers around the globe.
In a previous article, we discussed the industry shift that is happening where service providers no longer want to pay their vendors on a per seat basis. At the same time this shift is happening, providers have made it known to platform vendors that they also no longer want a line item charge per feature. Enter the world of universal pricing that is taking the UC industry by storm. What’s needed is a move towards universal pricing that frees up service providers to refine their offerings to suit specific target markets.
“Universal pricing provides a means to avoid getting line-itemed to death by a UC platform provider,” explained Jason Byrne, Senior Vice President of Products and Marketing at netsapiens, a UCC platform provider to service providers around the globe that is disrupting the market with universal session-based pricing.
“We only charge a single price for our UC platform which has all the bleeding edge UC features but also includes a full contact centre solution all under one solution and price tag”
Byrne adds that universal pricing simplifies the billing process on the back end, but also negates the need for the service provider to pass along those same line item charges to end users or resellers. “Simplicity and consistency in the pricing of the UC platform enables service providers to offer various packages from freemium to premium enabling those obscene margins they crave for,” he said. “Universal session costs enables service providers to create their own service packs and bundles of functionality that resonate with their customers and with maximum profitability.”
To learn more, visit netsapiens now.
