All subscription businesses want to be profitable, and in doing so they spend restless nights in planning and execution, finding out innovative ways to find new customers, and make more sales. However, one thing often ignored in the process is how efficiently you are retaining your newly-acquired customers. Are they spending a convincing amount of time using your products/services? Are they recommending you to people they know and love? What are their first and the latest impression about your brand? While various things collectively decide the nature of answers to these questions, a lot of it is solely depends on one thing: Customer experience!

A customer coming to your brand is the success of marketing but what if they are leaving to never return again? It is the failure of customer experience. Businesses – big or small, regardless of industries they serve, succeed because they know how to keep customers happy. Customer happiness, in plain simple English, is the most important pillar of a business. Shaken, it is the beginning of the end of a business. Solid, it will make you famous.

In subscription business too, customer experience is extremely important. This article will talk about this topic in our ongoing guide to subscription business challenges and how to fix them. Learn how giving customers a consistently rewarding experience can become a challenge for subscription businesses, and what businesses can do to make things great.

In this article –

• Subscription business challenges
• Spotlight on ‘Customer experience’ 
• Benefits of improving customer experience
• Customer experience in subscription business and its challenges
• Things to do to improve customer experiences
• How SUBECOB is uniquely positioned to address the issues of customer experience

Subscription business challenges

All businesses are created to face challenges. In other words, challenges allow business to grow. However, you must have a roadmap to address the challenges and keep growing; otherwise it is end of the road to growth. There are wide-ranging challenges subscription businesses face, some of which include managing customers, automating billing and invoicing, securing recurring payments, following an all-good pricing model, managing transactions seamlessly, managing discounts and promotions, providing multi-currency and language support, following proper accounting compliance etc. The series of article we have started will cover most of the challenges and their fixes. In this article, as mentioned above, let’s put the spotlight on customer experience, which is a major challenge, and is the reason many subscription businesses could not scale or fail.

Spotlight on customer experience

What was the last time you had an extremely rewarding experience as a customer. Now, think what made that experience rewarding. Generally speaking, customer experience is the overall impression a customer has on your brand and its products/services throughout their journey with you as a customer. Small impressions and experiences mix together to create the larger customer experience. For example, what would you call it if a customer finishes the purchase of a desired product quickly, with help from company representatives throughout the process, and even after buying, the company help desk is instantly available to clear any queries of the user on the use of the product? It must be a rewarding experience. On the other hand, what if a customer fails to get any help and support during any stage of his journey? He would lash out at your product on a social platform, harming your social status and revenue. This is why customer experience is crucial for a brand to succeed.

Benefits of improving customer experience

A good customer experience comes with these benefits –

• Increased opportunities to generate revenue
• Enhance customer satisfaction
• Improve brand loyalty
• Make a competitive edge in the fast-growing business
• Control churn rate
• Increase the lifetime value of customers

Customer experience in subscription business and its challenges

Customer experience in subscription business must be simple and rewarding. Every stage of their journey should be backed by helpful information, guidance and help. To understand how to improve customer experience, we first need to understand what could possibly cause a bad customer experience. Let’s find some probable scopes of a bad experience…

• Not providing sufficient information for a customer to stay with you
• Cancellations are not quick and seamless
• Not keeping customers updated with latest announcements and other communications
• Billing management lacks transparency
• Failing to personalize experiences
• Pricing model is not transparent or changes frequently
• Not innovating to provide customers more values
• Not using the right tools to retain customer interests

If you look at the points, you will find that they all are part of a customer’s journey with your brand. If a subscription business does not keep its customers updated about policy changes and suddenly makes major changes, such as in pricing, it leaves a negative impression because many customers may not at all be ready to accept the changes. Similarly, if they are not allowed to exit whenever they want and imposing restrictions on exit may prompt them to never consider your brand in future. Even if you simplify things later, they would not know it, and all they would have in memory is the bad experience.

Customers want quick onboarding, super simple experience while they are using your products/services, transparency in billing, security and confidentiality of their personal information. Also, they want is a seamless and fast experience where trust and confidence stay. Good and successful subscription business begins with the understanding of their customer thought process. More on this below –

• Make every stage of buyer’s journey as simple and quick as possible
• Collect information from customers to personalize things for them, but do not be nagging in the process. Many people prefer to disclose only essential information. That’s perfectly fine. Personalize can come later. First, create values for them with whatever you have.
• Always gather feedback. Some policy changes are unavoidable, but even so, keep customers in the know of every development that relates to them.
• Make sure your billing is transparent and secure, and you have robust systems in place to keep customer data protected.
• Always come up with new ideas – be it in offers, rewards, or anything else – make them feel valuable.
• Ask questions on how you can improve
• Respond to their queries faster
• Reward their loyalty

How SUBECOB is uniquely positioned to address the issues of subscription business customer experience

Many businesses fail to provide consistently rewarding customer experience because they fail to use the right tools. Subscription businesses must use a tool that simplifies the entire experience of customers, right from onboarding to usage and beyond. This is where they have SUBECOB – one platform to simplify subscription life-cycle with better visibility, more control and results.

This is a glimpse of what SUBECOB can do for you to improve customer experience in subscription business  –

• Take customer experience to the next level with advanced Customer Portal that enables self-registration, account maintenance and shopping cart functionality etc.
• Roll out new pricing strategies—from trials, free months and rollover to promotions and discounts. Do all of that seamlessly to spot the right mix for each audience and vertical market.
• Give customers unique variations of products and services, encouraging first-time customers turn into life-long customers.
• Optimize your subscription-based offerings with customer-centric reporting and market intelligence.
• Ensure accurate and timely billing and payment for services.

And then there are several other features that make SUBECOB the NO 1 subscription billing management software for growing businesses across industries. Why not request for a demo to see the magic? Even if you are ready, no worries! Try the free version presently available for 1-99 customers. It’s a limited time offer. Hurry!