Despite serving as one of the first adopters of application programming interface (API) technology as a tool for building collaborative, communicative business solutions, the telecom industry has failed to leverage the opportunities and efficiencies that come with this innovative software tool.
Traditional configure, price, quote (CPQ) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions have not kept pace with the complexity of telecom serviceability and quoting. This has forced providers and brokers alike to seek out alternative systems and tools to get the job done.
The reliance on outside solutions has disrupted efforts to incorporate CPQ into the telecom company’s customer experience. API-based quoting as a service (CPQaaS) was conceived with the goal of addressing these limitations around CPQ complexity and service integration.
The Competitive Benefits of CPQaaS
CPQ as a service (CPQaaS) allows businesses to integrate complex quoting capabilities as a microservice into their existing CRM/OSS. APIs give easy access through a single endpoint, allowing telecom companies to adopt CPQaaS while preserving—and improving—their end-user experience.
The capabilities of CPQaaS unlock the following competitive benefits for telecom businesses:
The Ability to Offer Complex Quoting to Customers
As availability, serviceability, and other telecom variables grow more unwieldy and complex, more powerful quoting tools are required to juggle business rules and complex calculations in the CPQ process.
Reduced Customer Acquisition Costs
The use of API-based quoting lets customers build their own service packages, reducing labor for telecom businesses.
Improved Time-to-Market for New Services and Quoting Capabilities
By integrating CPQaaS instead of swapping out your entire telecom sales infrastructure, your business can maintain the agility it needs to quickly adopt software updates and service capabilities. The value of this agility will become more obvious over time, as continued telecom innovation creates new demand for more powerful tools and services.
Optimized Use of Internal Resources
By leveraging CPQaaS to automate and optimize the quoting process, sales team members can commit more time to other areas of need, without sacrificing quality in the quoting process.
The Ability to Share Intelligence Between Business Partners
This includes sharing between carriers and brokers to improve quoting and the overall customer experience.
Serving Customers Through Complex, Flexible Quoting
As the complexity of products and services evolve, it is increasingly important that telecom providers and brokers utilize APIs to enhance their own customer portals.
CPQaaS unlocks the following capabilities:
- Identifying aggregation and provider access: This facilitates faster quoting service and connects users to data already within the CRM.
- The ability to leverage hundreds of quoting services through a single API: This capability provides complex, scalable quoting at a level not possible through more primitive quoting solutions.
- The ability to integrate quoting solutions into proprietary software: By integrating into an existing sales tech stack, CPQaaS offers faster adoption and onboarding, which ultimately leads to faster transformation with less disruption to your overall sales strategy.
Using APIs to Build a One-Stop Shop
Through the use of CPQaaS and integration through a single API, a telecom provider or broker can enhance their own platform experience, providing customers with better and more comprehensive services through a single point of interaction.
This prevents what’s known as “swivel chair,” when customers and telecom staff are forced to move between platforms as they navigate the sales process. Instead, CPQaaS reduces friction in the quoting process, and the sales conversion process can be accelerated.
Transforming Quoting into a Value-Added Service
Complex quoting is only a source of friction when you lack the right tools to deliver this service. By adopting CPQaaS into your current telecom sales infrastructure, your business can achieve new efficiencies and performance capabilities, strengthening your business model and improving your customer experience.
Schedule a demo today to see how CPQaaS can transform your sales process.
