Premier Companies is a pioneering audio marketing company that has been offering world-class digital ‘on-hold’ marketing messages and related services to business customers for nearly 40 years. They continue to stand out with their cornerstone product “HOLD PLUS,” which delivers high quality, customized hold messages that enable Premier’s clients in retail, home service, medical facilities, and other industries to better inform, engage with, and serve their customers.
As demand for Premier flexible cloud-based phone systems and marketing solutions rose in recent years, so too did the volume of data to be billed and payments to be processed. To help manage this increasing complexity, Premier chose Rev.io as its billing and payments provider, which has enabled massive customer and revenue growth.
“We always billed our clients annually, and from day one, payments were all (sent via) check,” says Mark Bortz, Premier Companies founder and CEO. “We billed in advance, and we minimized our billing and payment processing requirements.” That manual billing method worked for a small team with a small client base, but as demand for PHONE PLUS services using cloud technology continued to grow, competitors began setting a new standard for buying and paying for telephony services. Customers now expected monthly billing, online account access, and a choice of digital payment methods.
Then, Premier experienced a new surge in demand when the pandemic drove the workforce into home offices. Companies with legacy analog phone systems suddenly needed to upgrade to cloud-based communications to accommodate this move, and many others — especially essential businesses — needed to provide customers with important and ever-changing business updates via HOLD PLUS. Premier was growing faster than ever and needed to be able to bill and collect payments from this massive surge in an efficient, reliable and profitable way. Manual processes had to go.
With their billing and payments problems solved, Premier is perfectly positioned to see continued growth. In two years since becoming Rev.io clients, their annual revenue has more than doubled. And today, as customers continue their digital transformations in hybrid work environments, Premier is still scaling rapidly, now doubling their billings month-over-month.
Bortz is thrilled with the operational efficiencies of Rev.io Payments, saying, “The auto-pay option allows us to bill tokenized cards on file for all accounts on the first of each month with a process that runs about two hours at 2 a.m.”
Premier Companies is enjoying plenty of other benefits of Rev.io Payments. Profitability tops the list because many PHONE PLUS customers opt to pay with ACH, which is less expensive to process than credit card and paper check processing. In addition, the sleek experience and interoperability between Rev.io’s billing and payments portals makes it easier to upsell ON HOLD services and create long-term customer retention.
Acknowledging that efficiency is a key to success, Bortz credits Rev.io Payments for his company’s ongoing growth, “If we tried to scale the business without this technology, we couldn’t scale, and our customers wouldn’t be as happy.”