Challenge

Open Infra believes that access to the internet allows people to focus on what’s most important to them—and what makes their lives better. Since launching in 2009, the company has brought fiber optic connections to more than 50 cities in Scandinavia. As Open Infra matured, it began looking for operational efficiencies and implemented Zapier, which automates workflows by connecting apps with no code. Early on, Open Infra used Zapier to automate discrete tasks like notifying customers about potential service outages during bad weather. When a specific webhook receives a signal error indicating that a connection is down, Open Infra gets a notification that includes the area affected. That notification triggers a ticket for the company’s network department to investigate the issue and sends an SMS to all affected customers, all via Zapier.

Those efficiencies helped Open Infra with additional expansion. By 2021, the Swedish company saw more opportunity for international growth, which required a new billing and payment provider to help it invoice customers and collect online payments after completing fiber installation at their homes. “We wanted to make sure the customer is invoiced correctly, on time and efficiently, and that the payment process is smooth,” said Nevio Vapnar, Open Infra’s product manager for billing and automation. “We wanted to make sure the customer journey is top of the line.”

The new partner needed to offer the ability to easily turn local payment methods on and off as Open Infra began operating in different parts of the world. It was also important that the payment partner’s technology would integrate smoothly with the rest of Open Infra’s software and support its efforts to automate processes across the business.

Solution

After considering multiple payment providers, Open Infra chose Stripe for a UK pilot. “We were looking for a platform that had global reach, because we were thinking about scalability, and we wanted to make sure we would be able to integrate it with Zapier, as our use of Zapier was growing internally,” said Vapnar.

The UK pilot was a success—so much so that Open Infra moved existing customers who hadn’t been invoiced yet from its legacy provider to Stripe just a few months later. Across the world, the company implemented Stripe Billing and Stripe Payments to invoice customers and process their payments. As a result, when a new customer was signed and ready to go live, a workflow in Zapier updated their customer record in the appropriate Stripe account, depending on their region, then triggered Zapier to create an invoice in Stripe and send it to the customer.

To further streamline the process of expanding into new markets, Open Infra adopted Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, which includes a set of embeddable UI components through Stripe Elements, access to 100 payment methods, and Link, Stripe’s accelerated checkout solution that autofills customer payment details for a fast, easy checkout experience. Stripe’s Payment Element lets the company easily turn on additional payment methods without any coding or development time. The Optimized Checkout Suite also includes Payment Links, which allows Open Infra to make sales by sharing a link to a payment page, with no code required.

With Stripe up and running, Open Infra began to use Zapier to automate even more of its billing workflow. For example, to deal with overdue invoices, Vapnar used Zapier to set up a workflow that checks the old information on the invoice and creates a ticket in Open Infra’s Salesforce integration. Next, the Zapier integration triggers Open Infra’s email platform to send an email reminder with a Payment Link to the customer, as well as a link to the company’s payment portal, which is powered by Stripe.

Results

Stripe’s Zapier integration decreases invoicing time from days to seconds

Before optimizing workflows with Stripe and Zapier, an Open Infra customer service agent could generate just 80 invoices a day. The process took so long that the company occasionally had to push due dates later as a result of invoicing delays. Now, Open Infra can generate 800 invoices a second—dramatically increasing the company’s ability to collect revenue on time.

“Agents used to have to spend weeks generating invoices. Now it’s all done automatically thanks to a seamless integration between Stripe and Zapier, and agents can instead focus on being there for customers who need help,” said Vapnar.

Local payment methods support international expansion

The ability to easily turn payment methods on and off has helped drive Open Infra’s global expansion, as the company can customize payment methods based on customer location. For example, Vapnar recently turned off Google Pay in Germany due to lack of usage—but when a few German customers asked to use the digital wallet, he was able to turn it back on immediately. “The flexibility is one of the reasons I really enjoy working with Stripe,” he said. “If a customer says they want us to have a particular payment method, we can turn it on and it’s available right away.”

Today, Open Infra’s customers can pay by cards (including credit, debit, and Amex), Link, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Bacs Direct Debit, SEPA Direct Debit, and ACH Direct Debit.

The combined integration creates a virtuous cycle

Using Stripe and Zapier together has boosted efficiency at Open Infra and helped the company make the most of both platforms. “In just the three or four months of our UK pilot project, I realized how much more I could do with Stripe because of Zapier, and then because of Stripe I could use more of Zapier,” said Vapnar.

About Zapier

Zapier is the all-in-one AI automation platform for operations teams. Zapier helps them build custom solutions their way, by combining no- and low-code tools with 7,000+ integrations, like Stripe.