Where RevOps teams can find opportunities to optimize subscription revenue

Enhancing customer journeys and revenue

We often talk about how important the customer journey is for the success of subscription businesses. Crucially, within that however, there are some key opportunities for the revenue operations (RevOps) teams to optimize income whilst simultaneously contributing to a positive customer journey.

The trick is in understanding exactly where those opportunities lie and that’s what we have sought to identify in this article.

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The RevOps team’s symbiotic relationship with all business processes within the customer journey is crucial for optimizing revenue, reducing manual overhead, and enabling a strategic focus on customer retention.

How can you use pricing to support the customer and improve revenue?

Balancing customer benefit and revenue growth

Pricing is a pivotal part of the subscription journey—it's emotive, but it's also practical, both for the customer and the business. Often subscription pricing offers simple plans with limitations on various functionalities because they're easy to communicate to customers. However, that kind of binary approach limits the potential to maximize income by giving the customer more of what they want and less of what they don't.

The challenge with a system that isn't designed specifically for subscription businesses however, is that to create the level of customisation to tailor pricing to different groups is complex, takes a long time and is riddled with opportunities for error over time. However, by incorporating different metrics, well-automated processes and our all-important rule-based approach, different customers can trigger pricing and product packages that are best suited to them. This is especially important when you have third-party partners or resellers involved.

Even before you start liaising directly with the customer, with keylight you are able to offer versioned pricing using tags that you can apply to certain customer groups so they see the best pricing conditions for them. Meanwhile, another group will see a pricing model that's more appropriate for their needs, creating a better environment for sales.

Sales or support agents can give discounts, but how much are they allowed to give?

Providing a simplified environment for sales
and support agents

Discounts are a great tool for encouraging sales, but when, why and how they’re used are all essential questions, for not only making them appealing but actually driving revenue rather than running at a loss. It's important to ask the right questions to have a strategy behind discounts rather than simply looking to make a sale without doing the math.

Do you want to send the discount to every market segment?
Are discounts dependent on different factors?

From a company perspective, the important thing is to give sales teams the ability and flexibility to apply discounts to help push sales over the line, whilst retaining control and transparency over what can be applied and when. To have control over what sales representatives can give to different customer segments you need the right system.

By having the ability to automate certain processes through guided selling and rule setting capabilities, businesses can stay in control of discounts and how they're applied. At the same time, users will find it easier to know what and when they can apply different discounts to specific customer segments, and discounting can be kept in line with considered marketing strategies for optimizing revenue.

How can your choice of payment provider influence profits?

The right gateway to maximize profit margins

Profits are often made and lost in the margins. You can lose a lot of money by not staying aware of spending in places such as transaction fees. When choosing payment providers and deciding how payments are processed in different regions and for different amounts, make sure to consider fees, their impact and whether there's a necessary critical mass to make them work for you.

Key questions to ask include:

Does every payment provider have the same transaction fee?
Is there a threshold your business is reaching where the fee is too high?
Should a different payment processor be selected for new customers or markets?
How many failed payments should be tolerated before the service is stopped?
Should the service only be provisioned after the payment is successful?
Do support agents have access to failed payments and do they have automated processes in place to handle different use cases?

With keylight, we provide native integration of global payment partners, offering secure and compliant gateways for both non-electronic payment methods, pay-per-link and popular electronic payment methods in some countries. We also connect with multiple payment service providers to cover the global market and enable the best payment solution for each customer to maximize the customer experience as well as the business outcomes.

How can you optimize cross-selling and cancellation journeys?

Implementing customer retention strategies

Customers who are looking to leave or who are not 100% happy with their service they're currently receiving are a great opportunity to cross-sell, learn and retain through data on the customer journey as well as a well-designed cancellation journey.

Do you have a customer portal or somewhere you can let the customer know what else you offer?
Do you have a streamlined retention workflow with emails, SMS, calls and in-platform notifications from marketing, sales to support teams?
Do your teams know why customers cancelled?

Central to turning disgruntled customers into positive advocates, and possibly those who upgrade as well, is understanding them, picking up on warning signs and having strong communication capabilities. The best way to achieve that is with a dedicated customer portal allowing you to have a continuous understanding of customer behavior.

Our customer portal is designed to be user-centric, allowing for configuration and a great user experience straight out-of-the-box, directly connected to the billing engine and downstream accounting processes. That helps you to understand and communicate with customers. It's also the foundation for designing a great cancellation flow which will inform better sales messages to attract customers to the right products, but also help to reduce churn by picking up and pivoting customers who are preparing to leave.

How can you use invoicing processes to maximize income?

Effective subscription billing automation

Subscription billing and payment processes are often considered merely as transactional, but their seamlessness is fundamental to profitability. Failed payments and overdue invoices can leave a practical dent in profitability as well as causing cash flow issues and accounting challenges.

Is there a late fee for overdue invoices?
What happens if customers pay for the invoice but not the late fee?
Do teams have a clear overview of when and why payments are late?
Is there an automated process for debt collection?

Often failed payments are an accident as payment details are out of date or overzealous security measures block them. Making it easy for customers to stay up to date ahead of time with good communication processes and billing that has transparency and connectivity with the whole customer journey will make all the difference. At the other end of the scale, dunning management and smart retry features can help to remind people if a problem has occurred and minimize involuntary churn.

Implementing successful billing strategies requires easy adaptation so you can cater to individuals and customer segments at the click of a button. With keylight that’s exactly what you get. You can focus on strategy because the system is there to deliver what you need. Its powerful subscription billing capabilities inspire admins to be creative and automate subscription billing for advanced strategies. It communicates effectively with customers at touch points including the checkout page, invoices, emails, and provides comprehensive tools for businesses to streamline customer data for better outcomes.

keylight offers these functionalities out of the box on a fully configurable and all-powerful, user-centric business platform.

Power your business
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Power your business
with the right subscription solutions

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Explore keylight's superior value compared to conventional subscription platforms

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Explore keylight's superior value compared to conventional subscription platforms

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