Customer service providers want to support their clients in every step of their business journey. In the B2B and B2B2C sectors, supporting clients means they have to deliver excellent service in the face of any changes, whether their client wants to switch up their business model, add more offer packages, introduce new pricing or adjust for when the business grows. Thus, the flexibility of all internal operations plays a strategic role in the provider’s value creation process.

Unfortunately, fewer than one-third of organizational transformations succeed, according to research by McKinsey. Some of the reasons for a low success rate include starting from the wrong point, the absence of a clear innovation plan and the lack of adequate tools.

Developing organizational structures capable of coping with changes in customers’ processes—and simultaneously running a solution for the new services side-by-side with the existing ones—should be supported by solid back-end software. When choosing a solution for their digital processes, companies have to consider the capacity to evolve smoothly alongside them. 

Over the course of productive collaboration with big and small service providers in various verticals, which include telco, gaming and utility, I witnessed otherwise perfectly tech-savvy company executives being surprised to learn to what extent inadequate practices and software were preventing their businesses from growing and evolving. As the market is changing and new opportunities for more complex business models emerge, similar issues appear across all industries. One of these is the lack of automation in revenue and partner management operations. Let’s take a closer look.

Case study: online casino provider

When MaxBill entered the online entertainment and casino sector, we discovered that many companies were still using the unfitted in-house software or manual operations for their billing and contract management processes. In particular, one client—a major eCasino platform provider—used Excel spreadsheets for revenue management. Therefore, each operation’s accuracy depended on the accountant’s concentration and vigilance. Taking into account the multitude and complexity of the contract data, and the sheer quantity of transactions, calculations were very complicated and lengthy. The potential for human error was huge. The accountants were not able to properly control the contract policy changes in the Excel worksheets and reflect them in the calculations in a timely manner. All of this could result in huge revenue losses at any moment and obstructed the scalability of the company.

There were other problems. The production of reports regarding revenue distribution for every single partner was done manually and took days to accomplish, while still lacking in accuracy and transparency. This led to a breakdown in communication between partners and clients, as the company often could not sufficiently explain its invoices.

The executive team wanted their business to grow faster and more effectively through expansion of the client base and providing more service options. With these goals, the old way of revenue and partner management had to change. The company needed an alternative approach, which would support its growth vision and contribute to future-proofing the company.

In pursuit of their goals, company leadership automated the most impactful workflows to ensure the simplicity of contract management and negate the risk of human error. At the same time, by administering the right level of approval, they were able to preserve the possibility of full control over exceptions. This perfected the accuracy of reconciliation even for complex revenue-sharing schemes and simplified the audit of contract changes. Now it was easy to edit any of the existing contracts and create new ones, with the changes immediately reflected in revenue calculations. Account managers could analyze the data and create forecasts for future revenue. This