Business Model - Charging for phone support or consultations

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Target audience

If your income is mainly based on local and international calls‘ consumption by your client, this might be a really good alternative to differentiate your revenue stream. In this model any company that has clients, who are ready to pay for the phone support or consultations (telecommunications, IT, medical and any other industry) can be your customer.

What is needed to implement this

  • MOR system
  • DID number


How it works

  • End user tops up his account (to be able to use the phone support). In postpaid mode user pays at the beginning/ end of a month
  • End user dials the DID number
  • MOR system authenticates the user
  • User chooses appropriate topic by pressing digit from 0 to 9
  • Phone support is provided
  • After support is finished, user‘s balance is deducted

The rate

The rate can be decided based on your client’s experience in this area. It can be an hourly rate like 50 USD/h or an advanced rate, formed by your client’s request like 5 USD setup fee and 0.5 USD/min first 20 minutes and later 0.25 USD/min. From your side you need to decide whether to charge your client only a monthly fee for a DID number or split the revenue for incoming calls. We recommend applying flexible pricing till you see which model works better for you.

Local DID or Premium Number

Your client can choose to purchase a premium rate number to avoid having to bill his clients directly. Setup and rental costs are often quite high for small businesses and probably not really an option unless for those whose clients have a big request for support. Another option would be using a simple local DID which allows companies to avoid spending too much money comparing with premium rate numbers.

The payment type

Your client can choose billing both in prepaid and postpaid mode. The most secure way to charge clients is using a prepay schedule. This allows avoiding the use of late fees altogether. But if they work in B2B sector, it is quite common to use the post-pay schedule and charge clients in the beginning or end of a month.

ROI

Profit in this business model consists of two parts:

  • Monthly profit per DID
  • Profit per incoming call
    • Standard fee for each client
    • Individual fee based on client’s rate and revenue split (let’s say 70% for client, 30% for you)

Let’s assume that in total your clients receive 10 concurrent incoming calls during the working days and working hours. They charge 20 USD/h rate and you get 30% revenue which is 6 USD/h or 0.1 USD/min. So having 10 concurrent calls in working days and working hours with 0.1 USD profit per minute you could reach 100 080 USD monthly profit!

Here is how you can calculate this: there are 21 working day in a month, 8 working hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 500 calls in a minute and 0.1 EUR profit for a minute, so we just multiply this:

21 x 8 x 60 x 0.01 x 500 = 10 080 EUR per month!

To summarize, charging for phone support is quite easy and you may find that clients love you for it because you give them opportunity not to reduce their expenses on international calls, but to increase their revenue!

We are sure you will find this article useful.

For more information feel free to contact us at b2bsales@kolmisoft.com

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