SAPPHIRE NOW Finance Keynote: After tumultuous year, finance orgs finding forward in cloud
After a year of turmoil and great challenges, it’s time for finance organizations to think about the way forward and how to get there.
Your business is moving to the cloud.
Your revenue is moving to the cloud.
Every product will become a service – and the revenue streams you’ve built your business upon will change or disappear – fast.
We are living in a personalization economy where consumers of both products and services expect contextual, relevant offers, as well as customized solutions that anticipate their needs. If you think that this job is the responsibility of marketing, think again.
Outstanding customer experiences are the future of all commerce.
This means you need to rethink every aspect of how you do business and how you engage with your customers, including how you bill them and what you sell to them. Moving your revenue management to cloud billing solutions allows you to offer personalized services to your customers and enables them to use your product or service according to their preferences.
The way we bill now: Enabling business model innovation at scale
To illustrate how real-time personalization of services is unfolding, let me set the stage by sharing some incredible results from the TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2017 Hackathon.
Strewn coffee cups, partially-torn candy bar wrappers, low-battery signals on mobile phones, and a late-night dash for pizza – there’s nothing like a 24-hour deadline to set one’s priorities and focus. A steady momentum kicked off and was the birth of both creativity and heightened emotions for teams vying for top honors at the Hackathon.
Forty-five teams hacked their way to success – and failure – in hopes of claiming the $5000 prize for a prototype-clad solution built within 24 hours. When all was said and done, a plethora of ideas and innovation astounded judges and contestants as they realized how quickly ideas can turn into reality – and revenue.
The Grand Prize winner, Quick Insurance, provided an elegant, yet simple, mobile-first solution to customize insurance subscription billing and services. Imagine that you’re going on vacation for a week, and taking along a valuable camera. The concept from Quick Insurance would allow you to get coverage for a specific valued item, in a few taps of your phone, for a length of time of your choosing. This allows insurance companies to deliver personalized customer experiences through a pay-per-use billing model, in a quick, consumer-friendly way.
It’s better in the cloud: How two companies improved customer service
Companies are improving customer service to increase customer loyalty, boost brand value, and grow business. Discover two real-life examples.
Generate instant revenue with cloud billing services
Reimagining the AR shopping experience, BillboardAR hacked a way to eliminate the space between seeing a billboard ad to purchasing the product.
Answering to the demands of the age of instant gratification, a consumer or potential customer can simply point and click their phone at any billboard ad, and quickly get detailed information on where to find and purchase the product – even if the nearest store is online rather than brick and mortar.
Imagine the possibilities of turning any advertisement into an instant retail sale. The future of retail seamlessly blends the digital and physical worlds, offering a flawless omnichannel experience, and revenue in the cloud is a crucial component of this.
Altrui.st went home earning runner-up distinction, while hundreds of developers continued the conversation about the best way to court interested investors in the future.
Let the river flow: Billing, marketing, and commerce converge with subscriptions
Direct-to-consumer and subscription based commerce will play a massive role in the Consumers Products industry, and if you aren’t already incorporating them into your business, you should be thinking about it. The tricky part is figuring out how to add this emerging business model in a meaningful way to your B2B and B2C customers, without…
Flex the muscle of pay-per-use
We’ve all been there: Sign up for a gym membership, then exercise the most energy by calculating how much money you’ve lost due to your consistent excuses reasons why you cannot possibly get to the gym. (Attempting to cancel a gym membership is a topic for a different post.)
Gym-As-You-Go conceived that pay-per-use pricing would allow fitness centers the opportunity to generate a different form of income, while providing customers the flexibility to adjust their gym membership expenditures to actual usage.
They proposed that gyms could utilize surge pricing during peak hours, and would have the ability to set their own fees.
Real-time business model innovation at scale = point proven.
