Due to a rapid increase in mobile penetration and the roll-out of heterogeneous technologies in a multi-vendor managed environment, service providers are constantly on the lookout to achieve operational effectiveness and maintain a competitive edge.
Click To TweetTo harvest growth and keep up with the growing demands of the end-consumer, service providers focus their business strategy on rapid geographical expansion. Such an operational growth is usually supported by a rising number of sales agents, more commonly known as resellers of a service provider, in multiple regions of country of operation.
Increasingly complicated and widespread distribution hierarchy makes it difficult for the service provider to control and monitor performance of distributors and resellers. Let’s take the example of a telecom operator X which has a large number of resellers in multiple regions. These resellers are not only interacting in the form of transactions with the telecom operator and end-consumer but also with each other, known as reseller-to-reseller (R2R) transactions. Without a proper monitoring and reporting system, operator X will have no record of sales, stock levels and commissions. Consequently, the operator compromises on the ability to make well informed, intelligent decisions. To cope up with these challenges and achieve geographical growth, it is critical for service providers to have control over their distribution network, access to detailed performance reports and real-time visibility of transactions.
Creating functional strategies and implementing them for better supply chain management includes the following steps:
Geographical location tool, part of Electronic Recharge System (ERS 360°), is capable of handing the control over to the service provider and achieving operational effectiveness. This enables the service provider to implement its processes in a better way, improve resource utilization and achieve business goals and objectives. The tool not only captures the location of the resellers intelligently but also comes equipped with advanced features like location-based restrictions, comprehensive reports, campaigns and alerts.
Location Based Transaction Restrictions
Location capture and restriction feature of geographical location tool allows the service provider to identify the regions of resellers and define business rules.
This feature restricts the R2R transactions and limits the resellers to buy credit stock only from the authorized parent reseller of the region and not otherwise.
Through this feature, service providers can:
- Ensure that value is distributed according to regional hierarchy
- Ensure that commission due to sales in one region is earned by the respective resellers and distributors
- Monitor and compare sales performance of multiple regions
Comprehensive Reports
Geographical diversification of resellers makes it difficult for the service provider to monitor and manage the accounts and stocks of all the resellers. Comprehensive reports in Geographical location tool give access to an overall sales performance picture as well as in depth performance reports of individual resellers. Service provider can access these reports through an interactive and user friendly web portal. Input filters on these reports enable the service provider to generate reports giving a bird eye’s view of his entire distribution chain or zoom into performance of a specific region or even a reseller within a region. He can extract information on top performing resellers, inactive or dormant resellers as well as see the real-time stock in hand of each reseller.
By accessing the information in this portal, service provider can make strategic decisions related to business growth and sales enhancement etc.
Through this feature, the service provider can:
- Generate region specific comprehensive sales transactions reports
- Check reseller account balances
- Improve monitoring of stock levels to ensure business continuity
- Enable better sales forecasting
- Monitors sales and set targets for the resellers
Localized Campaigns
Using the end-to-end information that the service provider has through comprehensive reports, it can now categorize resellers on basis of their type, region and sales activity etc. The system is capable of not only categorizing the resellers but also allows to put business rules around various transaction types, for example, R2R transaction between resellers of the same or different region.
Service provider can create segments of these categories and run targeted campaigns for resellers or transaction type falling only in that specific segment. If the reseller meets the campaign criteria set by the service provider, he can benefit from the reward associated with it.
Geographical Location Alerts
Geographical location alerts is a tool that enables sales managers take proactive actions and devise strategies to boost sales.
This feature allows the service provider to send daily sales summary reports to the sales managers in each region via SMS. The SMS contains information on the overall sales made, stock levels maintained as well as day-to-day transactions for their specific regions. The service provider can easily configure the content, frequency and audience for these alerts.
Through this feature, the sales manager of a service provider can:
- Stay updated with daily performance
- Actively monitor the sales performance in their region
- Be proactive instead of reactive in their sales enhancement strategies
- Devise growth strategies where needed
Geographical location tool allows the service providers to understand, study and bring transparency in operations. Through this tool, the service providers can not only ensure operational effectiveness but also achieve business continuity by actively monitoring and controlling its supply chain operations.
