The linchpin of subscription success

The customer journey is the lynchpin in subscription business success. Across the board customer experience (CX) is where the competition now lies. For example, Alterian and CX Network’s State of the Customer Journey Experience report found that 54% of organizations rank CX strategy as a high priority moving into 2024.

This is a crucial space for businesses to focus on, and in subscription businesses it's more important than any other because of the ongoing nature of the sales process. The challenge is to repeatedly help customers to feel like retaining your service is worthwhile. 

You need a system that enables key touch points with customers and with a unified data source for relevant teams to understand who they're talking to. This is about more than tracking website visits or email opens. This is about understanding how customers interact with their subscription contracts, purchase add-ons, pause or resume their contracts, as well as making a conscious choice about how much of this they are able to do by themselves.

Enabling meaningful customer interactions 

The challenge for sales teams in subscription businesses is enabling them to have enough autonomy to meaningfully sell to customers with the flexibility to meet their needs, whilst still ensuring that they don't stray beyond certain parameters that would negatively impact the business. 

Being able to do that without creating complex, bespoke requirements that are difficult to track and manage requires a high degree of sophistication within the subscription technology. Without it, you will be subject to lengthy and clunky (often costly) customisation processes. Here are a few of the things you need in your subscription platform to make this possible:

Quote to cash process

In established enterprises there are usually well-defined sales guidelines and processes in place for product, pricing and perhaps approvals for certain accounts. However, manual operational details often cause a lot of back and forth between sales reps and managers.

As a result, customers become disappointed by messy or poor experiences and the workarounds become convoluted, slow and expensive, inhibiting business growth through the inability to maintain a healthy sales pace.

To keep up with the pace of any growing subscription business it’s important to have a purposefully designed, user-centric system with an end-to-end quote-to-cash (QTC) process. This should be combined with a culture of continuous development and reinvention of the entire QTC approach, informing not only what a customer buys, but their sense of trust and enjoyment when it comes to engaging with your organization, all of which impacts business growth.

Guided selling

Everyone is different, so when you have a global customer base it's important that you are able to offer a wide range of product and pricing options. However, with a complex product catalog, onboarding new sales reps can become a lengthy and error-prone process. The alternative is that the business limits itself to a simple offering and misses out on potential revenue as a result. 

Look for a system that enables guided selling, giving sales reps flexibility and autonomy in a controlled environment. For example, our guided selling software solution enables both sales representatives and customers to make more precise product selections in the sales process, thereby increasing efficiency and conversion rates. It does this by leveraging rules and data to guide the user along the sales path by tailoring it to their conditions.

Bridging sales and finance processes

The nature of subscription businesses is that they are ongoing (if they're successful), and when relationships are continuous, they are subject to change. 

Lots of organizations see finance as separate to the customer and wider user experience, but in subscription businesses it's fundamental that they are connected with a system that bridges sales and finance processes, automatically connecting an action one end (such as a voided order, contract modification, cancellation or credit memo) with the impact at the other.

For example, if you have a customer who wants to add two more users to their contract one week after signing, that might mean they now qualify for a discount. However, the invoice is already written. With automation, the change instantly connects, reducing accounting errors and risks, and giving customers an instant response/update rather than sending them the wrong bill.

Essentials for financial health 

Making sure payments are collected is a fundamental part of any business, but where repeat payments are the cornerstone of the organization it's even more important. Ensuring they come through on time, in the right amount and consistently is essential for the financial health of the organization, requiring systems that are not only easy to use, but that are secure and have processes in place for consistently late payers, addressing out of date payment methods, failed payments and so forth.

Enabling different payment methods

The variety of payment methods that you offer is incredibly important, especially if you sell globally. Different regions around the world typically gravitate towards different payment methods, whether its credit cards, Apple Pay, bank transfer etc. 

Equally, different demographics will likely have preferred payment options they feel most comfortable with. This isn't just about practicality, it's also about making customers feel safe. Offering localized payment options can show how invested your business is in a local market and create flexibility for customers that removes barriers to use.

For example, keylight connects with multiple global payment partners to facilitate secure transactions and local payment methods, giving you everything you need for a coherent payment strategy that supports your business now and in the future. 

Optimizing payment experience

Payment experience is also important not to overlook. Ask yourself how easy it is for your customers to pay and update their payment details? 

Allowing customers to manage their payment methods through a customer portal is a great way to optimize customer service in subscription businesses. Not only does this make management easier for the business, but it also instills a sense of control and autonomy for customers. 

It gives them transparency and the option to manage their payment type easily, as well as supporting other features, such as upgrading or downgrading their service.

Integrating customer support seamlessly

The support processes that you have in place - both human and technical - are inextricably linked, and are fundamental to your customer experience. It all hinges on connectivity, both for the team and the customer.

Transparency and customer behavior

Your customer experience starts from the moment a potential customer interacts with your site. The beauty of a good subscription platform is that the more a customer interacts, the more you know about them. 

However, to make use of that knowledge to improve the customer experience, that data needs to be connected, contextualized and available to support agents. This will help them to maximize the customer relationships after purchase, helping to prevent churn. 

For example, keylight’s end-to-end capabilities mean that you have the real time data to understand your customers and their behaviors in order to support their preferences.
 

Customer self-service

On the other hand, it's important to make things as easy as possible for customers, and in a modern context, that's a balance between feeling supported and having access to support when they want it, but also having the autonomy to do things themselves. For this, customer self service capabilities are essential. Not only will they take the pressure off staffing requirements, but they are important for supporting a great customer experience. 

Through a purpose-created customer portal, customers can interact with support agents and manage their subscriptions with easy contract changes such as upgrades, downgrades and placing new orders. Crucially, the mechanics of a true customer self-service system gives you the opportunity to increase the number of customer touchpoints and data gathering opportunities that you have, through which you can better understand them and continue evolving your offering to suit their needs. 

Observing and recording how customers interact with their subscriptions will give you insights into the customer journey, alerting you to any opportunities or issues. This will kickstart the development of a more sophisticated approach to customer experience, and as a result, the resilience and success of your business by facilitating the development of predictive analytics to understand customer behavior. That in turn will support retention, upsales and help you to try to intercede before a customer decides to leave.

The balance of data and context 

For a long time the digital world has been heralding that data is king - and it is, but without its contextualizing queen it's not much help - in fact it can be a bit overwhelming. Subscription businesses (like every business), need to not only collect data, but collect the right data and have it placed in context so that you can make meaningful and informed decisions off the back of it.

Structured events

Subscription businesses need to observe a different set of data to more traditional businesses in order to get a holistic view of the ongoing customer journey and customer behaviors. To do that, you need technology that's created with understanding the user in mind (both customer and team member). 

At keylight, our API-first approach allows the front-end, user facing side of your subscription platform and the back-end system to talk to one another seamlessly. We use GraphQL API, which allows developers to ask for and get the exact information they need per data query in a structured way. An API-first approach makes the system easy to work with, enabling you to get what you need for your subscription requirements.

Reaction times

In addition to having the right data, you need to be able to use it, not only in long-term decisions such as optimizing functionality, but by reacting to customer events in time you can retain them through the right engagement methods, predicting and preventing churn.

As keylight collects dynamic, event-driven customer interactions instead of static transactions, your teams can see how customers interact with their subscription. That means users can understand the evolution of the business relationship with each customer for improved responsiveness, scalability, and agility instead of taking actions based on hypotheses.