“The reseller portals allow our resellers, dealers and partners to manage themselves through SOLID too. They can view their own accounts and suspend their own clients. This time savings takes a load off their team and has drastically improved our relationships with them. They all now swear by SOLID.”
Nigerian Satellite Internet Supplier, Coollink, Increases Revenue and Metric Visibility through Automation
The challenges presented to Coollink through the use of non-ISP specific ERP systems were numerous. Disconnected and non-automated essentials such as invoicing, service suspensions and reporting lead to severe revenue loss and time wastage.
SOLIDitech’s Business Automation Platform, SOLID, was able to revolutionise the ISP’s operations. This was achieved by automating, amongst others, Coollink’s financial processes, Yahclick API integration and dealer relationships.
The results included an immediate 100% increase in collections, accurate and automated customer billing, integrated and easy-to-use system operations and reliable and real-time reporting.
Coollink Limited is a Nigerian Internet Service Provider with its head-office located in Lagos and a nation-wide presence: Abuja, Port Harcourt, Kano.In 2009 Coollink was the 1st African ISP to sign up with Yahsat to distribute Yahclick in Nigeria.
Headquarters: Nigeria
Website: www.coollink.ng
The Challenge: A Disconnected and Non-ISP Specific ERP System
Over the years, Coollink tried a variety of operational system solutions. The most recent, an Oracle-based ERP solution, worked for a few aspects of the business, but didn’t provide a fully automated ISP specific solution.
Coollink’s biggest challenges included:
- No automatic invoicing: The invoice format was inadequate and unautomated, resulting in a multi-step manual invoice creation process for both regular and pro-rated invoices. Contract creation was also delayed to the first of the following month for new customers – leading to a situation where many clients were not being billed for the services received.
- No automated disconnections: Difficulties in accessing outstanding payment reports meant that non-paying customers received their services for ‘free’ for too long before being disconnected.
- No user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface): The application wasn’t web-based and proved very cumbersome and technical to use on a day-to-day basis. Client details were difficult to add, technical assistance was needed to add new products, and generating reports was a nightmare.
The bottom line: Coollink was losing revenue through unbilled clients and all their combined manual interventions to ERP processes were costing them time and resources.
How SOLIDitech Helped: An End-to-End Automation Platform
SOLIDitech’s Business Automation Platform, SOLID was able to assist Coollink by automating their ISP business from end-to-end.
Most notably for Coollink, SOLID automated the following:
- Financial Processes: SOLID provides a customer CRM that is fully integrated with automated billing, financials and collections. This ensures that all financial functions are connected with the same database, and are accurate, automated and real-time
- YahClick API Integration: SOLIDitech integrated the SOLID platform with the Yahclick API. This means that all Yahclick Satellite broadband services are supported natively on the SOLID platform. This makes placing orders, gathering historical site information and service suspensions & reconnections significantly quicker and easier.
- Reseller/Dealer/Partner Relationships: The dealer relationship model natively supported by SOLID gives each dealer access to their own SOLID management portal. Through this, dealers are able to manage themselves, view their own account and suspend their own clients.
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Nigerian ISP Coollink has launched a state-of-the-art Konnect Africa VSAT service. SOLIDitech’s fully integrated solution enables Coollink to automate the delivery of their new VSAT products, offering a superior customer experience from sales to support.
“On the very first day we went live with the SOLID platform in April 2014 we saw the highest collections rate we had ever seen”
The Results: Reduced Revenue Loss, Increased Metric Visibility and Business Agility
SOLIDitech’s Business Automation Platform, SOLID was able to assist Coollink by automating their ISP business from end-to-end.
Most notably for Coollink, SOLID automated the following:
- Reduced Revenue Loss
– 100% Improvement in collections from the very first day
– Invoices are calculated and sent out automatically, ensuring every client is billed for their services
– Coollink are now able to track non-payments in real-time, which automatically results in disconnections - Increased business visibility and time savings:
– Everyone across the business now has easy access to trustworthy and real-time information
– Order processing and administration tasks which used to take 20 minutes each, now take 2 minutes each
– Logging in and viewing a client’s details used to take 3-4 minutes, it can now be done in 2-3 clicks
– Real-time, reliable reports are all generated automatically through the system (For example: Sales reports, churn reports and payment ageing reports) - Business Flexibility:
– The SOLID platform is customisable and the easy-to-use GUI makes it possible to quickly and easily add new products and configure certain fields without technical knowledge. This decreases Coollink’s time-to-market with new products and ensures increased customer satisfaction
– Integration with the Yahclick API and more recently, with the company’s bandwidth manager, consistently saves Coollink time and resources and allows the business to respond to their customers’ needs quickly and effectively - Full support from SOLIDitech:
From the first day of implementation, SOLIDitech has provided support for every step of the way
– 24/7/365 Support is always available and integrated system monitoring means SOLIDitech is able to proactively respond to any problems
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Nigerian ISP Coollink wanted to make Internet services more accessible to both home users and SME’s by harnessing the power of mobile money. SOLIDitech designed a set of innovative Internet products that support real-time payments via the Interswitch Quickteller platform.
