As we all are familiar that, Customer acquisition is one of the important phases in the business process. There are certain best practices to increase the customer acquisition rate and reduce churn. Streamlining customer acquisition process will boost the sales of any cloud service provider.

1. Trial Sign-up Process:

Cloud computing enabled users or end customers with Try & Buy model which gives an option to sign up for a Trial period, evaluate and go for commercial contract. Cloud service provider should have a system in place which allows them to define a trial plan and activate their access. The system should automate the life-cycle of a Trial User such as trial plan activation, providing limited/controlled access to the service, deactivation of the trial services based on the trail period expiration.

2. Effective follow-up :

Cloud service provider should communicate to its Trial Users effectively in advance to convert them into Paid Users . Sending regular communications will help in keeping the trial users in engage and explore to the additional & attractive services by opting for the paid subscription which will result in maximizing the cloud service provider’s revenue.

Cloud service provider should have a system which provide the list of Trial Users whose access is about to expire . System should send regular communication on the account expiry date and other promotional service offerings.

3. Contract sign-up & tailor made plans

It is very challenging activity for cloud service provider to sign-up a commercial contract with its customers. In addition to the plans or packages offered by cloud service provider, customers will have their own plans, service requirement and contract terms during contract negotiation. Cloud service provider should meet their customer requirements by singing up tailor made contract. Cloud service provider system should be able to define flexible service packages, plans, pricing & contract terms.

Cloud Service providers should provide customers, the choice to utilize their preferred services. Which not only reduces the churn rate substantially but also retains high value and profitable customers. With this, service provider can experience increase in overall organization profitability. Cloud service providers should have a Business Support System and Monetization platform, which streamlines the above discussed customer acquisition process.

eVapt, a customer management, metering & billing solution for Cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and On-Demand businesses. This billing and monetization platform available on-demand and enables service providers to both automate their back office operations, as well as support more sophisticated pricing and billing models. eVapt is revolutionizing the way Cloud businesses can run and manage billing. In addition to dramatically simplifying a service provider’s billing, payments and subscription management capabilities, eVapt can also offer additional benefits to other parts of a service provider’s organization such as Marketing, Finance & Accounting, Sales.

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