Regal Cuts Time to Bill by 50% with m3ter
Industry: Communications as a service
Tool before m3ter: Spreadsheets
Pricing model: Varies by product across seat fees, prorated pricing, and usage-based
Regal is a data-driven CCaaS platform that personalizes customer interactions using intent signals, combining automation and human agents for proactive engagement.
Decreased time to bill by 5 days
Recovering overages from just one customer achieved a 100% ROI in the first year
Billing through m3ter platform after 1 month
Responding to customer inquiries and complaints is a crucial function of any business. But while the average person might picture a call center as a stereotypical sea of cubicles with hundreds of agents simply reacting to angry customers, call center software has come a long way.
Regal, for example, is doing contact center software differently. Unlike traditional call center software that is predominantly focused on inbound inquiries, Regal was developed to be proactive – enabling the outbound sales motion as well. The company’s vision of success is helping businesses “reach the right customer at the right time with the right message to drive more sales.”
Regal does this through a wide range of products, such as branded caller ID, sales dialer, SMS, agent desktop, REGAL AI, and reporting. But as Regal’s business and product line grew, billing was becoming more unwieldy. Scalability was a significant concern.
Pricing models differed by product, with a hybrid of traditional seat fees, prorated pricing, and a number of usage-based offerings – all of which were applied against a quarterly, semi-annual, or annual prepayment.
Customers’ usage and pricing were tracked in a spreadsheet, with billing amounts each month passed to an outsourced team to apply against prepayments. That third party tracked the drawdown of prepayments in a master spreadsheet, calculating any overages and sending out invoices.
This inefficient, manual process for billing was what led Regal to start looking for a solution. “That was ultimately why m3ter was needed,” said Director of FP&A James Bazilian. “If we had just needed to calculate the number per month, it wouldn’t have been too bad, although it was still inefficient. But we also needed to track how that was factoring against the prepayments, which is very tough in a spreadsheet.”
Building an internal billing system wasn’t an option. Like many growing businesses, Regal wanted to keep its engineers focused on the core product. So, they started comparing options and knew m3ter was the right choice.
“m3ter seemed like a combination of a perfect replacement for our Google Sheet and a much better system, but also a team that was willing to customize and work very closely with us on what we wanted it to look like,” says James.
Transforming complex, manual billing with m3ter
As Regal started their m3ter implementation, the impact on processes was quick: within one month, the team was billing through m3ter instead of spreadsheets. As James is a self-described “non-technical person who lives in Excel and Google Sheets,” he leveraged the m3ter team throughout the implementation.
There were a few key workflows that Regal needed m3ter to handle:
Adding new customers
Throughout the month, Regal’s Finance team needs the ability to easily add new customers, each of whom may have purchased from their wide range of products or even had a custom priced deal. For this, m3ter helped the team set up an integration with Salesforce CRM that ties a won customer to the list of products (and their pricing) in m3ter.
End-of-month billing
When the team prepares to send out invoices for the prior month, James ensures new customers are added and all contracts are up to date, then runs billing in m3ter for the entire customer group. He then simply approves the invoices and sends them to QuickBooks via the m3ter integration.
Prepayments
Google Sheets hadn’t been an effective method of tracking prepayments for Regal. As James noted, there was effectively no way to figure out how much of the prepayments were left across the customer base at any given time. “It was a completely manual exercise and an impossible task.”
With m3ter, James and his team can see the drawdown of any customer’s prepayment in real time. When he receives inquiries from customer success managers – for example, how much annual prepayment is left for a customer – James can quickly look up any customer’s usage and prepayment information in m3ter and pass this information to the CSM.
Understanding usage data with Data Explorer
As a non-technical user, James has appreciated the user-friendly m3ter UI, particularly the Data Explorer. It enables him to run reports and understand Regal’s revenue positions at any point in the billing period, all without needing to learn how to use APIs.
I think the biggest feature for me is [Data Explorer] – that m3ter built this way for non-technical users to retrieve information from this black box system that takes in pricing and usage and turns it into invoices. I can see how much of a product has been used in a month or get good data quickly on what's happened so far… That is very helpful for me.
Elevated confidence in billing accuracy and prepayments
For a company like Regal that had been manually calculating complex bills, m3ter does more than streamline the billing process: it gives them confidence that bills are accurate and they aren’t leaving revenue on the table.
The confidence boost on prepayments has been particularly impactful. Usage-based pricing models add significant complexity to prepayments, but with m3ter, Regal can show customers or CSMs exact usage data and balances for a prepayment period. “With m3ter, prepayments are the simplest thing in the world,” says James.
Simplify your prepayments with m3ter Commitments →
Governance of one customer's overages covered a full year of m3ter
Regal is shrinking the loop between FP&A, Accounting, and Billing by using m3ter and removing the 3rd party team to facilitate the spreadsheet transformation. This has led to significant improvements in overage governance.
After migrating to m3ter, they realized the usage for one customer in particular had blown past their prepayment, but no overages had been billed. According to James, the recovered revenue from that one customer’s overages paid for the first full year of m3ter.
m3ter helped us invoice more accurately and be more intelligent about making sure we're invoicing the correct amount… As our customer base and number of products were growing, I don't have confidence that our old system with the external team and the spreadsheet would have done everything correctly over the last 18 months.
Decreased time to bill by 5 days
With m3ter, Regal has reduced time to bill by 25 – 50%, depending on the month. Regal’s manual billing process before m3ter took around 10 days, due to the numerous steps, spreadsheet tracking, and manual sharing of information back and forth with the outsourced accounting and finance team. Even figuring out the amount of usage across customers used to take a few days.
Regal has also seen a marked decline in billing inquiries from customers, saving even more time. When they would receive an invoice question in the past, the Finance team had to audit all the manual steps to ensure mistakes weren’t made. Sometimes, they even had to reverse-engineer where a number in the spreadsheet or QuickBooks had come from.
With m3ter, they have higher confidence in the accuracy of bills and prepayments, meaning a decrease in the number of customer inquiries and an easier time responding to the ones they do receive.
Scalable growth for the future
James believes Regal’s streamlined billing process will become even more relevant as the company scales. “As our customer base grows, it would have become increasingly difficult to manage that in my Google Sheets model,” says James. “I think m3ter will be able to scale just as well as it does right now. I don't think there would be any technical challenges. I just think there would be more customers to manage.”
James says his team will be using m3ter to actualize one of the company’s core values – “Customers are royalty” – within the billing and finance function, both by working to minimize customer issues and to automate as much as possible. One of m3ter’s values – “Unlock Customer Success” – perfectly aligns with this and means our team will be there to continue supporting Regal along the way.
“Now that we’re out of implementation, we’re still adding products and working out kinks and trying to develop as a finance team,” James says. “I know that m3ter is going to be able to support us in automating things and helping us learn faster.”
About Regal Voice
Regal is the most data-driven, customer-centric Contact Center Software (CCaaS) on the market today. Brands use Regal to treat customers like royalty by understanding customer intent signals, tailoring interactions to each customer, and automating multi-touch inbound and outbound interactions from human agents and automated messages
https://www.regal.io/
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