There is no subscription business without automation

Multiple companies prefer to keep manual operations in place when it comes to critical business processes. Some combine it with modern business tools and integrate recurring payments model.

This contrast of past and future often undermines customer experience together with potential growth of a business.

Here’s the problem

Subscription business is all about customer experience. The only way to have minimal churn rate and grow a business is to pay attention to clients’ needs. This means adding value to products and services instead of doing raw commerce.

There are lots of tools available such as loyalty programs and game mechanics but in order to utilize them businesses have to move fast. Sales and accounting with no automation is exactly what drags down most of companies trying to add value and improve their services.

Calculating discounts and rewards involves looking up clients’ purchases and shopping experience tracking. Processing even a hundred of them is close to impossible when you have to manually export from multiple CRMs and do the billing. It often leads to inaccurate results and even loyal clients going away.

How is subscription business different

Even minor events should be handled by a back-office team. Recurrent payments multiply the workload and billing becomes real pain resulting in higher churn rate and upselling problems.

This model involves integrating main business processes: marketing, accounting and sales should be in sync. Manual operations with multiple CRMs in place work for anything but subscription business. Analytics, reporting and billing should be automated and here’s how.

Automated billing

Making changes is hard and when it comes to reassembling business processes for your company it requires you to have qualified managers and programmers together with modern tools. Businesses like farm products delivery often lack what it takes to integrate sales CRM, accounting and billing systems. They need something powerful, easy to use and affordable.

One of the tools available today is Hydra. It automates billing, provisioning and reporting, allows you to generate flexible plans, loyalty programs and handle recurrent payments. This is a way to integrate existing business processes and get rid of the rudimentary ones. As a result, business processes get predictable and deliver accurate data.

Automated billing is one of the main pillars of lowering your churn rate and growing a business with clients’ needs in mind.