FibreMax is an Australian telco success story. Founder Neels Fourie had previously run a South African telecommunications business and after moving to Australia, saw an opportunity to create a new business for the Australian market. He knew from his past experience that to build a scalable telecommunications platform, you need the right software partner.

“If you want to play in this market, you want to have a little bit of volume and you want to scale the business, you need to have the right platform as it is almost impossible to do this on a manual basis.” – Neels Fourie, Director, FibreMax

They were looking for a purpose-built software platform that could handle their billing, provisioning and service management needs. They decided to partner with Emersion because it was a system they could afford as a start-up that they were confident could scale to meet their future needs.

“Emersion had a specific offering for start-ups like us. This made it possible for us to use a proper telecom billing system – the biggest benefit of which is the ability to easily scale our business going forward.” – Neels Fourie, Director, FibreMax

FibreMax started off only selling NBN services and used Emersion’s API integration and NBN provisioning automation capabilities to develop a zero-touch online sign up portal. This enables them to sell NBN services at scale.

“When providing NBN services, you want to make it as easy as possible for customers to sign up. We can add one customer or five hundred – it doesn’t make a difference”. – Neels Fourie, Director, FibreMax

As FibreMax grew, their customers expressed demand for other communications solutions, like telephony and inbound phone numbers. As Emersion already had integrations with other Australian telco carriers, FibreMax was able to easily expand into selling other services.

“Emersion helped us to add a variety of different products and makes it very simple to sell these into the market. “ – Neels Fourie, Director, FibreMax

What have been the main benefits of using Emersion

The Emersion platform has benefitted FibreMax in the following ways::

• Expanding their product offering into voice services
• Streamlining their online sales process
• Reducing their labour costs
• A single bill for all services
• The ability to compete with larger telcos

Expanding Product Offering into Voice Services

Emersion enables FibreMax to get their operations up and running very quickly as a new start-up. Emersion’s existing relationships with telco vendors helped them to get set up quickly with established service providers whose services they were confident using. Neels shared, “Emersion made it easy for us to get a foot in the door and speak with the provider.”

Streamlining their Online Sales Process

From the outset, Neels was interested in Emersion’s ability to automate the entire NBN sales process. He worked closely with the development team to integrate their online portal to Emersion via API. This resulted in a scaleable, zero touch online sales environment. When a new customer visits the FibreMax website, they can sign up for a new service online.”They’ll land on our portal, take a modem and then billing will be taken.”  Once payment has been confirmed the next steps in the provisioning process take place. The service can be provisioned in as fast as two hours. Appointments are automatically made and the customers get notified via email or SMS.”

Reduced Labour Costs

FibreMax can use Emersion to automate many tasks, including data entry between multiple systems, payment processing and collections, service changes, data analysis and provisioning. As Neels puts it, “One of the main benefits is your labour cost. If you were using a more manual processing method you would have required more man power, more labour. In our case it’s automated, the system does the work –  so we don’t have to worry about it. Labour costs are extremely expensive and it’s much better for the system to do the work for you.” Neels particularly likes the service management functionality of Emersion. “The moment a customer goes over their allocated data allowance the system will automatically allocate them a new chunk of data. Let’s say one GB. And that is then reflected on their bill. It makes it really easy for us to manage our services.”

A Single Bill for All Services

Neels pointed out that “Telecommunication bills are traditionally really complex. If you talk to any end user or customer, they never understand their bill. They’ll get a separate bill for each service (mobile voice, business telephony and NBN) which is not really understandable.”

By using Emersion, Fibremax is able to aggregate every service sold onto a single bill, which makes more sense to a customer and simplifies the entire revenue generating and collections processes.

The Ability to Compete with Larger Telcos

As Neels puts it, FibreMax is “…a new business. Although we are a small player in the market, we are using a platform that we think will be used by the bigger players in the industry. We have the infrastructure in place. Now we just need to get prospective customers to our portal.”

By using Emersion, FibreMax has been able to streamline their billing and acquisition operations, which will become a massive competitive advantage as the company scales and grows.

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