Highlighting multi-carrier management and billing automation capabilities within Zipit's platform that improve workflow efficiency for Operations teams.
If your company sells cellular solutions or you support customers that do, you probably know that turning hundreds or thousands of SIMs on or off each month, and tracking each customer's individual data usage to ensure accurate invoicing, can become extremely time-consuming and burdensome for your Operations team. Especially if those SIMs are activated across different carrier networks that may use different SIM portals, may have their own unique workflows and almost certainly have different billing cycle start dates.
Without a consistent experience for managing large IoT deployments, companies are left to struggle through cumbersome processes that stifle their ability to onboard new customers and grow IoT accounts.
This situation was all too familiar for the Device Solutions team out of Cary, NC.
Tony Sammarco, Device Solutions' Director of Product Technology Strategy, put it this way:
We would get lots of requests from customers trying to get clarity around which devices were connected, which networks were actively being used, and other things like that. That used to require our support team to log into more than one platform and poke around those systems to try to gather those data points and pass that on to our customers.
The whole process wasn't very efficient for us and it was understandably frustrating for our customers to be in the dark about their own device connectivity."
A general lack of uniformity between carrier SIM management tools and the reports within them made simple requests from customers more cumbersome than they needed to be for companies like Device Solutions. At a certain point, they decided that they needed a better solution and turned to Zipit.
Sorting devices by carrier network in Zipit's Multi-Carrier Connectivity Management Platform
Within the Zipit Connectivity Management Platform, the Device Solutions team sees a consistent level of reporting for connected devices, whether the individual devices have been activated on the AT&T or Verizon networks. Unified workflow features allow Device Solutions' Operations team to easily turn SIMs on and off using the same process, regardless of which carrier network each device is activated on.
The flexibility of Zipit's platform allows Device Solutions customers to even manage their own activations in an on-demand, self-service model - enabling them to activate or deactivate devices as needed, and even monitor and export their data usage without requiring direct involvement by the Device Solutions support team. End customers don't even need to have their own AT&T Control Center or ThingSpace account.
End-user payment and device activations in the Zipit platform
And, the new efficiencies haven't stopped there.
The Zipit platform's automated usage tracking and invoice generation capabilities have saved the Device Solutions team a full two days each month that they would have otherwise spent on manual record keeping, cost calculations and creating customer invoices.
Invoice generation in Zipit's Connectivity Management Platform
These process improvements have been able to help position Device Solutions to more easily onboard and support new embedded device customers and put more of their operating focus into new business growth all while keeping customers happier and improving customer retention.
Allowing Device Solutions' customers the ability to enable and disable their own devices whenever they need to, saves time and money for everyone. For customers that want a higher level of support, Device Solutions can step in on their behalf and fully customize the cellular activation and billing/payment interface screens within Zipit's platform.
The combination of multi-carrier connectivity management in a single pane of glass, multiple data plan size offerings to minimize cost, customer-led SIM management and automated usage tracking and invoicing has been transformative for us. It's helped us help our customers save money, made our team more efficient and has positioned us to be able to sign-up new customers and drive more revenue going forward."
Are you struggling to manage multiple carrier relationships, oversee disparate SIM management platforms or get consistent reporting on connectivity?
Request a demo of Zipit's Connectivity Management Platform today.
