We spoke with William Brister, VP of Customer Success at SkySwitch, about how SkySwitch grew its white label resellers client base by over 3,200% after adding Rev.io’s sophisticated billing platform to its white label UCaaS platform.
SkySwitch
SkySwitch, a next-generation communications platform provider serving white label resellers, formally launched its business in 2013 with a unified vision: “take care of your customers and provide them with every tool needed to succeed.”
Following many years of steady growth, SkySwitch is now regarded as a key industry fixture serving white label communications resellers. The business, based in Tampa, FL, operates with nearly 80 employees and a client base of over 600 resellers.
Where SkySwitch Wins
SkySwitch’s next-generation platform incorporates everything from white-label UCaas to CCaaS, enabling resellers and MSPs to better serve end users, convert more sales, and ultimately win more customers. The business offers the following solutions as part of its comprehensive product suite:
- Hosted PBX
- UCaaS
- Hosted Call Center
- Virtual Fax
- Web Conferencing
- Video Surveillance
Accommodating Resellers
While SkySwitch’s white label offerings lay a strong foundation for sustained resale success, resellers also depend on other customer-oriented tools to sustain momentum.
Billing is one critical area where resellers look to SkySwitch for answers. William Brister, VP of Customer Success at SkySwitch, said resellers depend on the SkySwitch team for billing solutions as a direct complement to their white label offerings.
To identify the right platform for their reseller base, Brister said the SkySwitch leadership team extensively researched three billing options. After deciding two other systems weren’t the right fit, SkySwitch turned its attention to Rev.io, a sophisticated billing and back office platform with broad financial processing capabilities.
Results with Rev.io
In 2013, anticipating a significant ramp in growth, Altaworx executives decided to consider alternative billing and back office solutions. Rev.io, then H2O, came up as a potential fit during Altaworx’s fact-gathering process.
So what made Rev.io stand out among competing solutions? Derr said Altaworx appreciated the proactive changes Rev.io made to continue enhancing its business. After further assessment, Rev.io’s capacity to evolve in support of its clients cemented the software vendor as a top option for Derr and the leadership team at Altaworx.
The Results
For Brister and SkySwitch, Rev.io supports the company’s theme of providing a personal touch with its reseller base. With Rev.io’s quote-to-cash software, Brister said smaller resellers can appear “more sophisticated than their size indicates” to their customers.
This sophistication is more than just appearance, however, as resellers now have the capacity to manage taxes and compliance reporting on their own. For many white label resellers coming from the MSP world, managing such complex items is new territory. “The ability to handle their telecom tax collection management and compliance reporting [with Rev.io] means a lot to them,” said Brister.
Usage rating is another distinguishing feature of Rev.io’s platform that SkySwitch resellers gravitate towards. “The ability to rate calls and present a telecom bill with usage call detail on it makes a small reseller look very professional,” said Brister. Rev.io’s usage capacity makes resellers appear large to their customer bases, which can subsequently help empower growth, Brister added.
For resellers, the margin for error is razor thin. With hundreds of resellers billing thousands of customer accounts at once, millions of dollars are at stake if processing errors do occur. “You can’t afford any mess-ups. It would just be a nightmare to have any kind of major problem [with billing].”
But with Rev.io, resellers can mitigate these issues, add more seats, and grow into the billing model efficiently.
Critical Integration Support for MSPS
Some SkySwitch resellers operating in the Managed Services space choose to leverage Rev.io’s platform for new telecom and VoIP billing services they begin offering. Many of these MSPs use ConnectWise for their customer and professional services management, which means they require an additional connection with Rev.io to streamline efficiency between systems.
That is precisely where Rev.io’s integration with ConnectWise Manage comes into play. Brister said this new integration takes the manual requirements out of managing billing through both systems separately. As a result, SkySwitch resellers can increase efficiency and save their billing departments money. “We believe (Rev.io’s integration) is going to be very instrumental, especially for the MSPs that are with us and come to use us that (depend on) ConnectWise,” said Brister.
A Scalable Partnership
Beyond the obvious benefit of empowering its white label resellers, SkySwitch’s partnership with Rev.io creates new opportunities to scale.
As resellers grow, SkySwitch is able to add more seats. And by selling more of its main product, SkySwitch can maintain its own growth trajectory. In 2014, the year that SkySwitch formed a strategic billing partnership with Rev.io, the company’s total reseller count was 18. Fast forward to 2021, and that reseller number ballooned to over 600, an increase of over 3,200%. “[Rev.io] gives SkySwitch the confidence to go out, add new resellers, and keep growing the business,” said Brister.
Rev.io’s billing works so well that you often don’t have to think about it much in the grand scheme of managing a business, Brister noted.