Parallels Plesk Customer & Business Manager
A highly integrated billing and automation solution that makes it easy for shared Web hosters and resellers to sell websites, domain names, and SSL certificates and more.
Save Time and Enhance Customer Satisfaction
Parallels Customer & Business Manager simplifies your life by automating the full customer lifecycle—from ordering to account provisioning to recurring invoicing and billing. Whether your customers are creating (or upgrading) website accounts, registering domain names, or purchasing SSL certificates, Customer & Business Manager handles the task automatically, with zero manual effort on your part.
Plus, the easy-to-use self-service interface makes for happier customers by enabling them to purchase additional resources in real time and provision them right away. The end result is less overhead, higher revenues, and more satisfied customers.
What Makes Customer & Business Manager Different?
Only Customer & Business Manager gives you:
- The convenience of complete integration.
You can see and manage all your customers—including their subscriptions, invoices, payments, and plans—through the same interface that you use for Plesk. And your customers can manage all aspects of their relationship with you through one interface as well. This simplicity translates into major savings in both support and training. - Broad support for international billing.
With Customer & Business Manager, you can do business around the world. By automatically tailoring your billing to multiple locales—including the Americas, Europe, and Russia – Customer & Business Manager provides the multi-language, multi-currency, and international tax support you need. - Automatic recovery of unpaid hosting space.
When a customer fails to pay you, Customer & Business Manager will automatically recover the hosting space, so you can resell it to other customers. By making sure your existing servers are fully loaded before you buy more, Customer & Business Manager reduces your hardware costs. - Additional domain management functionality.
Like most hosting billing systems, Customer & Business Manager lets your customer select a domain name, verify its availability, purchase it, and automatically register it. But, unlike other billing systems, it lets your customers manage all aspects of their domain from your website, rather than having to go to the domain registrar’s site. That’s not only more convenient for them, but it avoids exposing them to competitive hosting offers from the domain registrar.
- Support for integrating domain registrars, sellers of SSL certificates, payment gateways, and more. Domain registration services also include fully automated renewals and transfers on behalf of your customers.
- An open and modular provisioning system that lets you sell virtually any service or product.
Fully Automated Hosting
Customer & Business Manager automates the complete customer life cycle, including:- Order taking, using an intuitive checkout process
- Provisioning the customer’s account, applying appropriate resources through service plans
- Payment acceptance—one-time and recurring
- Processing of upgrades and add-ons in response to customer requests
- Complete CRM details on each customer, with comprehensive reporting tools
- Ability to import customers from existing Plesk servers
- Update their credit card information
- Pay bills
- Upgrade their plan or add new features
- Manage their domain names and SSL certificates
Quick and Intuitive Setup and Configuration
The initial configuration process been completely streamlined, so now all you have to do is fill in your company information and you can be up and running. You can configure other features—e.g., for accepting payments or processing domain registrations—when you’re ready to use them.
Different Account Types and Privileges
Customer & Business Manager lets you set up three types of accounts, each with its own privileges.
- Administrator accounts for your staff, with access to all features and tools.
- New! Reseller accounts for those who resell your services to end customers. Reseller access is similar to that of administrators, but only for their part of the business.
- Customer accounts for both your own customers and those of your resellers. Customers have access only to their own subscriptions and information.
Easy Billing and Invoicing
Customer & Business Manager completely automates billing and invoicing, with support for different types of billing cycles (e.g., starting each subscription’s billing cycle on the date of purchase, or prorating the first invoice so that all invoices can be aligned to a specific day of the month). It also supports:
- One-time and recurring billings
- Credit card payments (including encrypted storage and both automatic and manual payments)
- Off-site payment processors, such as PayPal and WorldPay
- E-checks and bank transfers
- Manual payment options, such as checks and wire transfers
- Promotions, including both one-time and recurring discounts (e.g., when customer commits to a two-year plan)
Auto-Suspend and Re-Enable
If you have customers who have fallen behind on their payments, Customer & Business Manager will start by sending a series of warning e-mails. If those don’t produce results, it will suspend the non-paying customers, based on rules you set up. It can even automatically reclaim the server space, so you can use it for paying customers. If suspended customers then pay their bill, their accounts will automatically be re-enabled.
Fraud Prevention
Customer & Billing Manager comes with built-in fraud protection. An e-mail blacklist blocks orders from customers who attempt to use a blacklisted e-mail address; and an online FraudGuardian system checks customers’ credit history and generates a “fraud score.” Your administrator can specify thresholds for requiring manual processing and for declining the order altogether.
