CRM, Billing and Lifecycle Management: Optimizing Your Customer Experience
•
2 likes•2,222 views
While billing systems were once banished to the back office, they now play a pivotal role in customer lifecycle management for subscription businesses. Your recurring billing system can be tightly integrated to a CRM system like Salesforce; loosely coupled, or actually be used as your subscription CRM.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
More from Fusebill
More from Fusebill (13)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
CRM, Billing and Lifecycle Management: Optimizing Your Customer Experience
- 1. CRM Billing and Lifecycle Management: Optimizing Your Customer Experience May-30-2013 1
- 2. Speaker Introduction Steve Adams, CEO Friday, May 31, 2013 2 www.fusebill.com Call Us at: 1-888-519-1425 Copyright Fusebill Inc. 2013. All rights reserved stevea@fusebill.com
- 3. Agenda Billing as part of the customer experience Integrating Systems – 3 models Fusebill Introduction Lifecycle Emails Salesforce Integration 3 www.fusebill.com Call Us at: 1-888-519-1425 Copyright Fusebill Inc. 2013. All rights reserved
- 4. BILLING IS PART OF THE EXPERIENCE May 31, 2013 4
- 5. Customer Lifecycle is Key May 31, 2013 5 Upsell Cross- sell RetainInitial Sales How do we keep customers longer? Which customers are most valuable? Are there signals of cancelations? What programs and channels deliver the most valuable clients? How do we move customer from free- to-paid? Who is most likely to upgrade? Buy another product? Support
- 6. Tools often focus on first sale May 31, 2013 6 • Salesforce (CRM) • Eloqua (Inbound Marketing) • Web Analytics • Email Marketing • Excel, SQL • Reports & Statistics • Trial and error • People Upsell Cross- sell RetainInitial Sales Pre-sales tools and platforms Lifecycle Tools Support • Zendesk • Live chat • Call centers
- 7. Billing Interactions are Overlooked • Order Confirmations • Invoices • Receipts • Renewal Notice • Credit card expiry • Disputes • Dunning (aka ‘hey deadbeat’) • Upgrades 7May 31, 2013 Self Service Needs • Manage account • View old charges • Download receipts and invoices Up to 40% of customer calls are billing related Roughly 50% of customer churn relates to failed payments
- 8. How? New customer “welcome” emails Successful payment notifications Failed payment notifications Alerts about expiring credit cards Statements and invoices Collection warnings, dunning emails and account status changes. 8May 31, 2013www.fusebill.com Call Us at: 1-888-519-1425 Copyright Fusebill Inc. 2013. All rights reserved Automate customers through their subscription lifecycle:
- 9. INTEGRATING SYSTEMS 3 Models May 31, 2013 10
- 10. Three Core Systems Sales Force Automation Web / Service Delivery Billing Financials Presales What you sell! Support Where is the system of record?
- 11. Model 1 – Sales Dominant Sales Force Automation Web / Service Delivery Billing Keep sales reps & agents in SFA Orders originate from SFA 1 2 3 1 – Rep enters order. Push to billing 2 – Billing approves (credit check, payment) Pushes to Service Delivery 3 – Billing updates status & entitlements Trials Non-payment Upgrades etc. Renewals
- 12. Model 2– Web Dominant Sales Force Automation Web / Service Delivery Billing Web drives leads / trials Push to SFA 1 2 3 1 – Customer creates account online – pushed to billing 2 – Billing approves (credit check, payment) Pushes to SFA 3 – Billing updates status & entitlements Trials Non-payment Upgrades etc. Renewals
- 13. Model 3– Billing Dominant Service Agents Billing Offline service or subscription No Salesforce per se1a 1b 3 (Optional) 1 – Customer creates account 1a – online 1b – via service agents 2 – Agents use billing system for status, payments, entitlements 3 – Data exports for fulfilment 2 Implication • Billing drives communications • Self Service Tools • Notes and comments
- 14. Typical Issues Not managing the billing interactions as part of the lifecycle Lost opportunity Often buried in a back office somewhere Integrations don’t match business processes ‘we do everything in Salesforce. Except for …’ No clear system of record No linking or synchronization of systems Can’t adapt to changing models 15May 31, 2013
- 15. Use the data to drive insights May 31, 2013 16 Upsell Cross- sell RetainInitial Sales How do we keep customers longer? Which customers are most valuable? Are there signals of cancelations? What programs and channels deliver the most valuable clients? How do we move customer from free- to-paid? Who is most likely to upgrade? Buy another product? Support
- 16. Implications for billing systems Proper management of billing communications Customer Self-Service tools: Online signups, orders, renewals Billing and payment history, payment management Integration options: Bi-directional integration to Salesforce Webhooks notifications of customer status and lifecycle events Open API for tight integration to proprietary systems 17May 31, 2013
- 17. FUSEBILL INTRODUCTION Automate billing for subscription companies May 31, 2013 18 www.fusebill.com Call Us at: 1-888-519-1425 Copyright Fusebill Inc. 2013. All rights reserved
- 18. Fusebill Executive Dashboard May 31, 2013 19 www.fusebill.com Call Us at: 1-888-519-1425 Copyright Fusebill Inc. 2013. All rights reserved
- 19. 2 Way Salesforce Integration May 31, 2013 20 Define pricing plans Invoicing, Collections Accounting Orders Updates Status Web orders Sales teams work in Salesforce Covert Opportunities – Sales Access leads and trials
- 20. Notifications via Webhooks Webhooks are an easy to use integration point Publish key events to notify external systems Account created Account status changes Etc. Used to determine whether service needs to be started or stopped 21May 31, 2013
- 21. Fusebill Platform Overview May 31, 2013 22 Scalable Multi-Tenant PCI Compliant Security API Layer – Customers, Subscriptions, Transactions Pricing Products Price Plans Usage Tiers Discounts Coupons Accounts Subscriptions Invoices Ledgers Reseller Tracking Payments Adjustments Billing Rating Usage Volumes Pro-rating Taxation Coupons Currency Adjustments Payments Credit Card ACH Storage Vault Gateways Dunning Retries Online Checkout Self- Service Portal Agent Interface Analytics External Payment Processing Invoicing Payment Terms Date Control Review, Edit Aging Adjustments Swipe & Subscribe Lifecycle Management www.fusebill.com Call Us at: 1-888-519-1425 Copyright Fusebill Inc. 2013. All rights reserved
- 22. 23 Try Fusebill Free for 30 days. No contracts, credit card, or surprises. Sign up at www.fusebill.com ThankYou! www.fusebill.com 1-888-519-1425 support@fusebill.com Twitter: @fusebill www.fusebill.com Call Us at: 1-888-519-1425 Copyright Fusebill Inc. 2013. All rights reserved
Editor's Notes
- Steve who is the CEO of Fusebill has over 20 years of experience in leading high-technology and software companies, most recently as VP and General Manager with j2 Global. His expertise in subscription billing comes from years of building and extending large scale billing systems for SaaS companies. For example he helped propel Protus into one of the fastest growing companies in Canada, with over 555,000 subscribers, before it was acquired by J2 Global in 2010. Steve also worked at Spotwave Wireless, CrossKeys Systems Corporation, Corel and Nortel and is a graduate of the University of Waterloo and the Ivey School of Business.
- What happens when your client claims (rightly or wrongly) not to have received an email? Or has lost the important information contained in the welcome email? Misplaced an invoice?Implement account status tied to payments: distinguish customers in good standing from delinquent payers and defaulted accounts, and ensure that this status is used by all service delivery systems. Once implemented make sure you set up alerts so both you and your customers are notified when an account status changes, this will significantly increase efficiencies across accounts.
- The key point is to recognize that the lifecycle defines an ongoing relationship and continuous dialogue.Forrester defines the customer lifecycle as follows: "The customers' relationship with a brand as they continue to discover new options, explore their needs, make purchases, and engage with the product experience and their peers.What happens when your client claims (rightly or wrongly) not to have received an email? Or has lost the important information contained in the welcome email? Misplaced an invoice?Implement account status tied to payments: distinguish customers in good standing from delinquent payers and defaulted accounts, and ensure that this status is used by all service delivery systems. Once implemented make sure you set up alerts so both you and your customers are notified when an account status changes, this will significantly increase efficiencies across accounts.5) Manage customers through their subscription lifecycle. Automate welcome emails, renewal notifications, and payment reminders. This will prevent billing errors, and save time and money.
- Typical scenario in web-driven businesses. Customers signup online (either for a free trial
- Offline subscription business, or where fulfillment is offline.Example:Subscriptions to physical productsMemberships (gyms, professional organizations)AAA type programs
- This dashboard provides real time monitoring of key business metrics – customer acquisition, revenues, product mix, ARPU, MRR.is intended to be used daily by managers and executives that want an overall view of the health of the business. The reports are concise and easy to understand, and complement the portfolio of detailed reporting on customers, products, revenues and other financial metrics. Fusebill is built not just to be a billing system but to help make some of the data talked about more accessible. The executive dashboard is for executives really shows year to date progress in terms of new customers, revenues, what products are being sold, how monthly recurring revenue and average revenue per user are increasing but also lets you drill in to looking at the lifetime value for customers seeing how that changes over time. This can be segmented, looking at different products or customer sources . You can also see signups and cancellations by product, churn but it’s important these metrics, are intrinsic metrics in the system and are brought up in a way that makes them accessible to marketing people – and that’s separate from the whole “how do I go and collect money from my customers” point of the system. We really wanted to make a point of making a service where you can get data out of the system to make it usable an actionable.