As competition for business increases, services providers are on an endless mission to enhance their service portfolios to retain and attract customers and grow revenue streams.  CSPs are adding more collaboration features to their suites, along with a growing eye towards IT-centric services.  Likewise, MSPs, in addition to growing their IT portfolios, are starting to deliver more and more communications services to their customers.  For both groups, it increases their stickiness and allows them to become the single service provider businesses desire.  But, it also muddies the waters and makes differentiation more difficult.

Determining what new services to offer is the easy part – technological evolution, popularity, and customer demand make strong cases, especially when combined with a revenue model that will promote growth.  Technology selection and implementation is a little trickier, but with the emergence of new standards, the availability of on-demand infrastructure, compute and delivery platforms, along with the emergence of the API Economy, connecting to data sources and building out new services is simpler and faster than ever before.  It’s also an area that has seen an incredible amount of effort on the part of providers, developers, partners, and industry associations, in an effort to encourage innovation and help all providers embrace digital transformation.

But, where providers often stumble is back-end integration, including registration, provisioning, billing, and compliance, which are as critical to the customer experience as the services themselves.  As providers start adding more and more services, connecting to more and more resources, the complexities of their back-end systems only increase.  Furthermore, with the current need for self-service capabilities, real-time reporting, fraud management and prevention, and integrating it all into customer services environments, opportunity can quickly turn into disaster.

I’ll be hosting a Webinar with three experts whose work is dedicated to helping providers effectively monetize their services while avoiding the pitfalls that can cause providers to fall out of compliance, produce erroneous billing, make it harder to modify or review services and usage, and generally cause them to deliver less-than-outstanding service.

These are elements of service delivery that may not always receive the most media attention – they’re not the cool topics, like security, artificial intelligence, or team collaboration – but providers’ success very much rests on their ability to deliver a cohesive, error-free back-end system.  Ideally, that part of service delivery will be invisible to customers, and that’s what Brent Reeves (Business Development, CCH (News - Alert) SureTax), Ryan Susanna (Sales, LogiSense), and Matt LaHood (CEO, Global Strategic Acountants) will be discussing on June 14 at 2:00 p.m. ET.

If you’re a CSP (News - Alert), MSP or ISP, consideration of new services that can increase your revenue and profitability is on your perpetual roadmap. So, I hope you’ll put this on your calendar to better understand how to not only ensure you are rolling out services effectively, but also how to maximize the value of all your existing and future services.

You can register for Monetizing Your Services, Maximizing Margin, and Staying Out of Trouble, here