Starting strong with comprehensive
business technologies

When you first take your product and business to market your vision, marketing strategy, product development and initial sales are the priority, followed by growing brand awareness and increasing market share. In many ways the functionality of your tech stack doesn't feature much on your radar. 

Automating recurring tasks for more efficiency

The operational details of winning new customers, onboarding new team members, setting up new partnerships and managing a variety of relationships can all involve many processes. 

These simultaneously need to be standardised for continuity, but also tailored for individual requirements and the best experience possible. It's these operational processes that are instrumental in defining the customer experience, the staff experience, retaining both and helping to establish the reputation of your business. 

With the right tech stack you can minimise friction and overheads by having systems and processes in place, but still allowing the flexibility and autonomy to respond to individual needs within an approved framework.

Essential features of subscription business platforms

There are standard tech stacks available for customer journeys, sales processes and payments, but every subscription business needs more than that. They need to also connect to financial workflows, data analysis and customer retention information, to name a few aspects.

The term 'customisation' has become lauded over the years as the height of sophistication, but there is such a thing as too much customisation. Having to build something of your own for every want, need and action is time consuming, costly, labour intensive and over time and scale it becomes almost impossible to manage.

An end-to-end system that offers total connectivity across the user experience, as required, alongside rule-based technology for customisations within an established platform that's built to evolve, means having the best of all worlds. It enables bespoke requirements quickly and simply, and without the need for engineering support to create customised processes, now or in the future.

Anticipating the future to secure your business

Thinking about the future today is a crucial part of starting your subscription businesses on the right track. Settling for compromises on day one (perhaps you can't automate certain things but it's ok because for now you can do it manually), might seem like par for the course, but it can store up problems down the line. 

You can choose a CRM and simple tools to start with, but very quickly new requirements will emerge, which will force you to compromise on essential areas such as the customer journey, as well as develop more and more manual tasks for your team to stay on top of. What started as a cheaper option will rapidly take hold of your budget and internal resources, which can be tricky to unpick.

It's true that you can decide to switch at a point that suits you to a more appropriate platform, and at keylight we work with lots of businesses in this situation to transition. However, by that time a lot of time and money has been spent unnecessarily, damaging the customer experience with unsatisfactory workarounds, and even risking financial loss through a lack of connectivity, transparency and customer churn. 

Knowing the type of capabilities you want from your tech stack both from the start and in the future, and making sure you have a system that can accommodate them is an important part of future-proofing your organisation. By future-proofing, we mean things that you will likely need within the first three years, not the next 10. It's not only fair but right that you have access to those facilities from day one because while it seems a lot at the outset, within a very short space of time it will become the enabler for growth where the alternative will start to inhibit your success and commercial sustainability.