This leader in pure-play unified communication (UC) and contact center (CC) software, with 100,000 customers, found itself at an inflection point. The company was set up for dramatic UC and CC growth and faced increasing requirements for its recurring revenue model.
The company partnered with HCLTech to modernize its order-to-cash solution to enable a cloud model and adopt subscription billing best practices.
The Challenge
Steep growth and increasing requirements
The recurring revenue model, the source of 64 % of total company revenue, was poised for growth. Already operating at huge global scale—140 million UC lines and 10 million CC lines at 220,000 customer locations—the customer wanted to achieve scalability and enhance the recurring revenue model. Those goals required the customer to migrate its solutions from on-premise to cloud and adopt a best-of-breed subscription billing platform.
The Objective
Modernize order-to-cash to enable a cloud model and adopt new best practices
To achieve scalability and enhance the recurring revenue model, HCLTech’s overall program objective was to modernize the order-to-cash solution to enable a cloud model and adopt subscription economy best practices.
HCLTech created three sub-programs to meet the objective: build two storefronts (one for B2B customers and one for B2C) for 29 countries in five languages, recommend and implement a subscription billing solution to enable bundled services and recurring billing for UCaaS and CCaaS, and deploy an ecommerce engine to handle B2B and B2C customers. Features of the ecommerce engine would include bulk upload of existing product catalogs, product prices, upselling and cross-selling definitions, bundling of inventory and non-inventory products, promotion and discount setups, billing and invoicing, order orchestration and provisioning, and license management.
The Solution
Design and implement a new order-to-cash solution
HCLTech was responsible for designing and implementing the order-to-cash solution. As part of the design process, HCLTech evaluated multiple subscription billing and ecommerce platforms. The team then designed the order-to-cash architecture to include the company’s storefronts, ecommerce and subscription billing, and real-time integrations among SAP, SFDC, Zuora, Magento and other platforms.
HCLTech implemented the solution globally across four sales channels. The team conducted the three sub-programs using SAFe agile methodology, and cross-program scrums aligned the overall design and integration.
HCLTech delivered the program, which touched close to 35 % of the company’s business processes, in eight phases over 18 months.
The Impact
Accuracy and improvement
HCLTech and the client tracked improvement KPIs throughout the process. The final post-implementation report notes:
- A 60 % uptick in subscriptions from SMBs
- A 100 % increase in CSAT
- A 98 % success rate in provisioning orders within two hours
- Improved UI for price, promotion, discount, and product bundling
- 100 % billing accuracy with alignment to the subscription model and zero billing loss
By anyone’s count, those numbers are engines for growth.