With great growth comes great administrative overhead.
Not the most inspirational quote out there, but one that is very true in the software realm, especially for subscription-based businesses. While most regular companies might encounter challenges with manually processing single digital transactions at scale, that pain is multiplied when you have to do it every month, while dealing with various different types of customers.
If you’re a subscription business struggling to optimize the payment process, it might be time to switch to something more streamlined.
Here are four major benefits you can get from automating your subscription payments:
As a subscription business, you’re likely offering different tiers of your service and acquiring customers from different channels. On top of that, each customer is likely at a different stage in their experience with your product. Some might be wrapping up their free trial, whereas others might be nearing their renewal. It’s hard enough to nurture relationships with your users, so why add the extra element of manually managing their subscription payments?
It’s vital to keep up with the growing level of complexity associated with your cohorts as your business grows and you acquire more customers. If you’re manually trying to keep track of each customer through their various stages, you’re taking valuable time away from improving your service and increasing customer success.
By switching to an automated solution, you can also give your customers the ability to manage their own accounts, upgrading their memberships based on their preferences at any given time. Additionally, you can also capture data to understand your customer’s lifecycle and payment behavior. This comes with two benefits: it frees up management time on your end and also improves the user experience.
Automating the payment process will not only make a major impact on how you navigate individual users throughout your different flows, but it will also work wonders on managing multiple user accounts or licenses.
For B2B companies who are purchasing product licenses or seats for multiple users, an automated solution will shift the control to back to the client, giving them the freedom to add and remove seats at their choosing. After all, your customers’ businesses are also constantly scaling – just like yours, and trying to be up to speed on how many seats are needed for each business at any given time can mean missed revenue opportunities.
This process also helps to manage renewals more effectively, allowing the service to notify users when their period is nearing its end. This ultimately reminds the customer that their service is renewing and their payment will be processed. You don’t even have to make a phone call.
With the establishment of the EU GDPR, 2018 has become the year of data security. Increasingly, companies are expected to have rigorous systems for the protection of customer data, and payments data in particular.
Using a sophisticated payments platform ensures that your data practices are compliant with the latest regulations. For example, Origins Ecommerce’s payment platform is PCI-DSS Level 1 Certified, which meets the most stringent level of requirements for Data Security Standards, or DSS.
In addition to technical security, your automated payments system should also have built-in fraud mitigation, to protect you from attempts at digital theft. Origins Ecommerce provides multi-layer anti-fraud protection and an in-house fraud team monitoring the latest trends, allowing us to respond to new threats much more quickly.
Not only are these security and anti-fraud features essential for compliance, they can also greatly reduce the chance of chargebacks. That’s a great boon for subscription businesses, because excessive chargebacks not only disrupt cash flow, but can also get your merchant account suspended altogether, thus disrupting monthly payments from all your customers.
When it comes to winning new customers and keeping them subscribed to your offering as long as possible, you’ll often have to go above and beyond the standard pricing options to get them to convert or renew.
Trying to make adjustments to your price, either through a discounted rate or a special promotion, only adds to the pile of manual payment management woes.
Switching to an automated solution like Origins Ecommerce gives you the ability to effortlessly set dynamic pricing options such as discounted, prorated and promotional rates, providing you with maximum flexibility and minimum complexity.
This gives you the agility you need to iterate on your plans rapidly, without worrying about miscalculations or technical mistakes that could hinder customer success – or worse - the sale itself, while putting you on a path to accelerate customer acquisition and retention rates.
The collection of subscription payments is a rules-driven process that has to be repeated on a regular basis. In other words, it’s the picture-perfect candidate for automation.
Automating subscription payments and the related data can be an absolute game changer for a growing software business. If you’re considering implementing such a system, contact us today to learn how Origins Ecommerce can help with your automation needs.
