Everybody loves a good deal, whether buying for ourselves, friends and family, or our work – we all want the best value for money.
But are you extending that same courtesy to your customers? Is your pricing truly transparent?
Since February 2020, UK-based telecommunications providers have been required to offer the best possible pricing to their customers. Regulations from Ofcom make it compulsory to provide end-of-contract notifications, along with the best available tariffs.
However, whether it’s a requirement or not, there is a compelling list of reasons why your business should be proactively offering customers the best tariff they can get.
In this blog we’ll introduce our latest solution, Price Plan Recommendations, before exploring why now’s the time to take a proactive approach to giving your customers the best deal available.
Price Plan Recommendations are a new tool from CloudSense that enables you to quickly recommend the best available deal for your customers – whether they’re individuals, SMBs or Enterprises.
The technology uses a multi-stage process to collect and aggregate usage data, before predicting and simulating invoices to provide tailored Price Plan Recommendations (PPRs).
Recommendations are created for individuals or large subscriber groups based on needs analysis and historical usage. Large user base prices are predicted by using AI and machine learning to cluster groups into similar usage profiles. Invoices are then simulated to demonstrate cost comparisons for proposed price plans over time.
PPRs can be automated on the channel of your choice and tailored to different use cases and requirements.
For example, you could integrate directly into sales and customer service or share recommendations via billing, messaging or your preferred marketing channels.
Let’s cover the new regulations again, because no one wants to be fined for breaching compliance.
New Ofcom regulations mean CSPs in the UK must send customers end-of-contract notifications as they approach the end of their fixed commitment period. In addition, all customers must receive information on the best available tariffs.
The regulations cover everyone – all the way from individuals, to SMBs and enterprises.
And the inclusion of businesses is significant.
Calculating the best tariff for one person may seem simple enough, but predicting the same for large subscriber groups of business users quickly becomes complicated.
This is particularly true if a business’ needs are evolving, e.g. if they’re opening a new office abroad and require more bandwidth for roaming.
The Ofcom regulations only apply to UK-based businesses, but there’s a growing global trend for regulation around price options and complexity. The Australian and Dutch energy markets have already been hit, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see regulation spread further across industries and geographies.
Even if you’re not preparing for new best pricing regulation, there’s mounting evidence you should practice best price plan recommendations anyway.
Customer experience has rapidly become a more important priority for businesses than price and product, and a sizeable portion of meeting your customers’ evolving CX expectations will involve being more proactive.
This includes preempting and troubleshooting problems – for example proactively compensating service outages - or delivering proactive pending order notifications to keep customers in the loop (and minimize your inbound calls and returns).
It’s time to add proactive best price plan recommendations to the list.
In an era where your customer holds all the power, if you wait until they threaten to leave before stating your best offer, it’s probably too late.
By then you’re fighting to just keep them – not providing the exceptional ongoing experience necessary to win customer loyalty today.
But there’s no need to push your customer to the precipice of contract cancellation.
Instead, during moments of risk or need, you can proactively engage customers with best prices. Whether that’s during usage spikes and end of contracts, or new price plans and framework agreement negotiations.
That way you’re providing a great customer experience, boosting your NPS and you can expect to see customer loyalty and revenues follow this upward curve.
Building loyalty and lifetime value are both essential for buoyant long-term revenues.
This is most easily demonstrated with a couple of statistics:
With these stats in mind, it’s prudent to reward loyalty, not penalize it.
Giving your customers the best available price instantly increases their loyalty – it shows you’re looking out for them.
And you can take this a step further by offering the right tariff to suit your customer’s emotional needs. Do they want predictability, minimal risk or the lowest projected spend possible? The ability to tailor your tariffs provides the personalized touch that keeps customers sticky to your brand.
By building trust and loyalty through transparency you’ll also increase the likelihood your customers will buy your adjacent products and services, or recommend you to other people.
As a result, using Price Plan Recommendations is a smart step to increasing both CLV and average revenue per user (ARPU).
By straddling compliance and sales with Price Plan Recommendations you can get the best of both worlds: a better customer service and increased sales.
This is particularly true if you embed your pricing tool in your platform of engagement, close to your customer. That way your sales and customer service agents are armed with another way to win over customers. On any channel your customer interacts with you, and whatever the context, your people can offer the best price plan possible – and action it in real time.
If they can analyze usage and tailor the best option available for individuals, families or businesses, your customer-facing teams can instantly offer more value.
This ability to satisfy needs, whether they’re known or unknown, positions your people as trusted advisors to your customers.
Ultimately, PPRs enable the kind of trust, transparency and actionable insights that will empower your sales people to both increase conversions and retention.
Price Plan Recommendations help you take a giant leap forward - both with your compliance and CX.
Regulations aside, we're currently in a highly customer-centric era of customer-centricity; so offering your customers the best available price plan should be considered a fundamental feature of CX best practice.
Switching service providers is quick and easy these days, and customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition. So fostering loyalty and lifetime value through PPRs is the smartest, fastest route to increased revenues.