Building Bridges to Success: The Power of Choosing the Right Subscription Management Partner
6 MIN READ
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Updated on September 3, 2024
“We win and lose together.” – Lewis Hamilton, seven-time Formula 1 World Champion.
The world of Formula 1 racing is a true testament to meaningful partnerships. As the engines roar and the lights go out, a finely tuned orchestra of engineering brilliance, strategic prowess, and precision execution comes to life on the asphalt battlefield. Each team member, from the masterminds designing the car to the unsung heroes in the pit lane, is bound by a singular purpose: to conquer the track.
If one of them falters, winning a championship would be impossible.
Quite similarly, a company’s success hinges on the strength of its internal and external partners. Like in Formula 1 racing, where the entire team plays a crucial role in achieving victory, businesses thrive when they collaborate with the right partners who share their goals and aspirations.
In this story, we unravel a client’s journey as they find a new partner in their mission to revolutionize global news through their online subscription news portal.
Let’s deep dive into their billing woes and how they solved it with a partner who listened to their needs.
Our client-in-focus, dissatisfied with their current subscription partner, sought a solution to support their rapid growth and enable quick price experimentation. They wanted a subscription billing and revenue growth management platform to meet their current needs and be a reliable partner for their future plans.
Chargebee’s end-to-end revenue growth management capabilities set us apart from every vendor they evaluated. Our client had an extensive list of requirements and sought a single platform to address them.
We demonstrated how we can handle the entire subscription process seamlessly during comprehensive product deep dives. From onboarding new customers, managing renewals, and integrating with multiple systems to recurring billing, personalized cancellation flows, rapid price experimentation, robust reporting, and accounting, we could meet most of their requirements.
Navigating the Turbulent Waters of Customer Dissatisfaction
Our client was trapped in the hodgepodge of disjointed pieces of their subscription management tech stack, relying heavily on manual workarounds, inefficient APIs, and unreliable native integrations.
It was frustrating, as each department struggled to get in the numbers they wanted.
The challenges were particularly acute in their CRM and Salesforce integration. It felt like a one-way street, with crucial information failing to flow from their subscription management system to the CRM.
It created a significant hurdle for the Customer Success Management (CSM) teams, who couldn’t access their system’s vital subscription, customer, and email information. When customers inquired about their subscriptions, the CSM teams grappled in the dark, desperately searching for missing subscription IDs. Lengthy ‘Can you please hold while I check this for you’ calls became the norm, leading to increased frustration for the customer and inefficiency for the CSM team.
Using Chargebee’s native Salesforce and Stripe integrations, they passed the invoice number through Stripe as a statement descriptor. Customers could now easily see the invoice number on their credit card statements and reference this when speaking to the CSM teams. With this new integration, the CSMs could easily search invoice numbers inside Salesforce and help out their customers quickly, without any significant delays or hold times.
Chargebee’s APIs proved instrumental in putting the technical teams at ease. They saw firsthand how they could extract vital data from Chargebee, enabling them to make informed decisions and plan their next strategic moves confidently.
Customer satisfaction soared as their inquiries were met with prompt and efficient support. Furthermore, they were able to streamline their subscription management process and reduce the complexities associated with managing multiple integrations.
Embracing the True Value of Numbers
Even with an army of data engineers, they grappled with a persistent challenge: reporting issues plaguing their subscription management platform due to an absence of a single source of truth.
Yearning for clarity and insights, our client held two critical requirements:
1) Understand which combination of plans and coupons are selling better than others
2) Access to quick data so they wouldn’t have to wait for their data engineers to get back to them
With Revenue Story, they could quickly know plans and coupon mixes were bringing in the money. The power to discern which combinations held the key to prosperity was now firmly within their grasp.
But that was not all. Report Builder freed them from the chains of waiting; they could effortlessly summon different data sets and weave them into comprehensive reports—be it high-level summaries or intricate details. And, within the Metrics Explorer, they found a treasure trove of subscription insights, a wealth of knowledge that spanned churn rates, plan performance, and transactions.
Breaking the Churn Barrier
Another prevailing concern echoed through our client’s corridors was the pressing need to stem the tide of customer churn.
Before Chargebee, they had no way to deflect a cancellation. While the thought of building a cancellation flow from scratch had crossed their minds, they were ecstatic when they discovered personalized cancellation flows already built in Chargebee Retention. Now, they could manage their subscription billing and reduce customer churn with a single platform. The ease of experimenting with different offers, a faster time to market, the ability to showcase all the benefits that the user was missing out if they cancel, and building an intelligent deflection funnel focused on personalization all in one place was just what they needed.
Plan & Pricing Management as a Growth Lever
In their pursuit of democratizing financial literacy, our client aimed to make news accessible to everyone. Recognizing the significance of customization, they leveraged the power of coupons and various pricing plans to offer tailored solutions catering to their customers’ needs.
With Chargebee, they could experiment heavily with coupons and 67+ different pricing plans and currencies. Specifically for their Group Subscription, they loved Chargebee’s tiered pricing plan offering where they could offer subscriptions based per seat/ usage consumption.
Also, to provide a seamless and user-friendly experience for customers signing up for their news subscription services, our client recognized the need to accommodate customer sign-ups through their main website, the Apple App Store, and the Google Play Store.
The client also wanted to display accurate coupon and pricing information to customers on their website. They wanted to ensure that any changes in pricing at the backend would be promptly reflected, presenting up-to-date and combined plans and discounts to customers during the sign-up process.
A seamless workflow via our APIs was devised to fulfill this requirement, guaranteeing that customers signing up would have access to the most relevant and up-to-date pricing information.
Beyond Transactions: Customer-Centricity as a Catalyst for Innovation and Growth
At Chargebee, we hold customer-centricity as one of our fundamental principles. Every business requires a genuine partner who comprehends its unique requirements to achieve success together.
And our collaboration with our client proved to be a perfect match. By leveraging Chargebee’s flexible APIs and revenue growth management capabilities, they gained the freedom to explore and make their subscription offerings their own.
From the moment a customer signed up to the intricate tasks of handling renewals, managing data flow across multiple systems, ensuring seamless billing cycles, experimenting with pricing and plans, and even tailoring cancellation processes according to their needs, they loved Chargebee; it was the comprehensive solution they needed.
Are you prepared to discover your ideal subscription management partner?
