Manage Customer Assets with Change Orders
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Create change quotes and orders to amend asset configuration.
- Use the Change of Plan feature to upgrade or downgrade assets.
- Disconnect and move assets.
Asset-Based Orders
Meet Carole White. She’s been an Infiwave customer for years.
Carole loves that when she wants to make a change to her internet plan or streaming media service, Infiwave fulfills the request immediately, without hassle.
Sadly, some other companies that Carole deals with act as if the customer relationship ends once an order is delivered. Carole and Infiwave know that not all orders are about buying new products or services.
By default, assets are created when an order is submitted for an account or contact. However, you can customize how assets are created to suit the order-management process flow in your organization.
Customers may also place orders to modify their assets by:
- Adding a product or service, such as adding a movie channel to a media subscription
- Updating a service, like increasing the internet speed for residential broadband service
- Disconnecting a service, for example, canceling a streaming channel
- Moving a service, such as transferring an existing broadband service to a new home
- Changing plans, for instance, upgrading a standard energy plan to a premium plan
Customers may want to change their assets long after they initially buy a product or subscribed service. This could be days, weeks, months, or years later.
Updates to Existing Assets
When changing an existing asset, you need to update the asset with the new details, as opposed to creating a new asset. Otherwise, the customer will have two of the same assets, which can cause data ambiguity. This approach also gives you service continuity.
When you change a plan, such as upgrading or downgrading to a new plan, Industries CPQ cancels the existing asset and adds a new, replacement asset.
How does Infiwave do all this so quickly and efficiently? It uses Industries CPQ asset-based orders (ABO).
If you work with Communications Cloud, you may already know asset-based orders as move, add, change, or delete (MACD) orders. You can use ABO and MACD interchangeably.
You can change an existing asset in a couple of ways.
- Create a new quote from Asset Viewer. Once the quote is accepted, create an order from the quote. Lastly, submit the order to update the asset.
- Create a new order from Asset Viewer. Once the order is submitted, update the asset.
You create asset-based quotes and orders on the account record, from Asset Viewer. As with all Industries CPQ quotes and orders, rules are applied to validate any changes. This ensures the changes are available to the customer, deliverable, complete, and accurate before the asset-based order is submitted.
For example, if Acme wants to upgrade their phone plan, Brooks creates a new asset-based order or quote in Asset Viewer to make the change. This way she can swap out the existing product without having to cancel the old order and create a new one.
ABO Creation from Asset Viewer
In Asset Viewer on the account page, select the asset or asset group you want to change.
Next, change the asset or asset group to a quote or order using the Select an Action button. Follow the guided process to complete the customer’s request, such as a change in asset configuration, a disconnection, a change of plan, or an upgrade.
You can also perform ABO actions in bulk. For example, if a customer has 100 branches and wants to upgrade the network services in each branch, you can do it in one action. You learn more about bulk updates later in this module.
Industries CPQ asset-based orders enable service continuity for the customer and help to avoid provisioning errors. You dig deeper into this process later on, so hold tight.
Order Actions in the Cart
As you make your asset changes, the asset-based quote or asset-based-order cart updates to show the changes. This includes any penalty fees or administration charges associated with the changes.
Here’s an example of a bulk change of plan with order actions that show what happens to the asset when the order is placed.
5G Data Plan is a new product that replaces the Individual Simple Choice Plan. The order action for 5G Data Plan is Add, which adds the asset to the customer portfolio once the order is placed. Individual Simple Choice Plan will be removed, so the details are struck through, and the order action is Disconnect.
Other types of order actions in the Cart are:
- Change: A change has been requested to the product or service configuration.
- Existing: An existing product doesn’t require any changes.
- Suspend: A request has been made to temporarily halt the service.
- Resume: A request has been made to reinstate the temporarily halted service.
ABO and Versioning
If you use versioning in your organization, the reference date of an asset version can impact the pricing and product structures associated with the change. Depending on your business processes, this reference date might be the date the original order was requested, the order start date, or the date the quote was created. Use reference date to map new order items from the asset if required. Read more about asset reference dates and versioning in the Asset-Based Ordering link in Resources.
Resources