oxio

Delivering pain-free internet services, one payment at a time

Canada’s oxio is a disruptive start-up providing domestic internet, TV, and phone services to customers across Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. oxio is on a rapid growth trajectory and, in 2021, secured $40m CAD in funding.

In a market not usually known for customer satisfaction and service quality, the company works hard to differentiate through customer experience and total transparency around its offering and prices.

Antoine Lord, Product Manager, oxio said: “In contrast with other providers, we emphasize human-to-human interaction and are committed to never charging more than what customers initially agreed to. In fact, when our costs have come down, we’ve actually passed the savings on to customers – that’s unheard of elsewhere.”

oxio’s focus on software is vital to enabling this differentiation, and the company has dozens of internal software engineers dedicated to ensuring the customer journey is as smooth as possible. “From choosing their bundle to adjusting their payment method, we’re committed to offering a pain-free experience,” said Antoine.

So, when customers started asking for automated pre-authorized debit payments, the company was quick to respond by engaging GoCardless.

Developed, tested and integrated in just two weeks

With GoCardless, oxio found a payments system completely aligned to its philosophy of transparency and responsiveness, and one that leverages automation to make customers’ lives easier.

“Our research led us to GoCardless, whose online materials were super clear, both about the benefits of bank debit payments and the inner workings of the solution,” said Antoine. “The solution offered all the automation features we needed and was already pre-integrated with our OSS/BSS system. We were sold pretty quickly.”

All oxio had to do was activate GoCardless via Sonar, add the credentials, and develop a handful of minor interfaces in the client portal. “We integrated the GoCardless bank payments option in about two weeks, so it was very quick,” said Antoine.

Lower costs, less failures

The company emailed customers promoting the availability of GoCardless payments and received an immediate response. “Hundreds of customers activated bank payments as soon as they were aware of the option,” said Antoine.

Diversifying its payment options has added welcome stability to oxio’s revenue. When customer cards expire or details change in some way, their payment will fail (often unintentionally). If that customer can’t be reached in time, for whatever reason, their account will soon be flagged as overdue, and their services eventually canceled. That’s the last thing oxio wants because churned customers lead to a loss of revenue. 

Antoine said: “Bank accounts don’t expire, so they’re more stable, and we’ve seen that in both the lower payment failure rates for GoCardless and higher recovery rates on subsequent tries compared to cards.”

oxio’s bottom line is further improved by the lower costs of collecting payments via GoCardless. “GoCardless payments cost around 25% less per transaction than credit cards,” said Antoine.

Set and forget

oxio knows that most people don’t want to speak to their internet service provider (ISP). In fact, they would rather forget about them completely, which means the automated nature of GoCardless payments is having a big impact. “After sign-up, payments are the main customer touchpoint and GoCardless is very much set and forget,” he said. “Since the funds are pulled directly and automatically from a customer account, we can save them the trouble of checking statements to ensure payments worked, manually scheduling monthly payments, or re-entering card details. That’s a huge win.”

Low maintenance, high value – for the long haul

Looking forward, and with the company’s sights set on expanding nationwide and beyond, Antoine believes that the dependability and scale of GoCardless means it will be a key contributor to oxio’s future growth.

“GoCardless is available internationally and has tens of thousands of customers – I knew right away that I could trust them to be by our side for the long haul, no matter how much we grow,” he said. “The portal provides us with lots of useful payment intelligence, and the solution itself doesn’t need constant updating."