Why it's difficult to find the right platform

Getting a platform that gives subscription businesses the functionality they need can be tricky. Lots of providers talk about what their platform can do in theory, but often gloss over how different capabilities are achieved. In our experience, and that of many of our clients, the answer is usually additional providers, customisation and invariably additional, ongoing, uncapped costs to maintain the bespoke workaround. In short, a lot of the capabilities are not part of the native system or the initial price. 

While you could just ask how the system supports all these functions, most business owners are not experts in the tech itself - and neither should they need to be. Their job is to be the business expert - knowing everything about the technology is your provider's role. 

The problem is that most providers don't see themselves as partners. However, when you're purchasing a platform that will be instrumental in the success of your business, you need someone who is invested in the long-term sustainability of the relationship, thinking about what the business might need in one, three or five years' time.

Operational needs so your subscription business can scale without friction

When you do find the right platform however, the operational possibilities for your business give it unlimited capacity for growth, uninhibited by logistics and processes.

The customer journey and customer experience are at the heart of a successful subscription business. There are lots of different aspects of the company that contribute to that, and we would argue that it needs to be considered in every part of the business. From a consumer facing perspective however, your platform can support your operational needs by including the following:

Elastic Product
Catalog

Catalog proliferation is a problem both for customers and internal company users, making it very difficult to find the right thing for the right customer, which can ultimately lead to dissatisfaction and churn. Make sure the subscription technology has a data model that allows your business to scale with a lean product catalog. This also has a significant impact on reporting, allowing you to see which products have been purchased, understand which subscriptions are active, and appreciate other subscription activities that will inform future product developments.

Customer
Portal

The customer portal, including the shop and checkout facilities, is where the customer can view their subscription plan, make payments or download invoices. When this portal is well-designed it can have a powerful impact on your business success. While it's tempting to custom design your customer portal, buying one that's ready made and purpose-built is both the fastest route to market and the best way to support your customers and your business, having already done all the research and worked out any teething issues. Your subscription platform should come with this fully prepared and ready to go.

Sales
Channels

The nature of subscription businesses is that as they scale, they sell their products or services in an increasing number of ways - directly, through partnerships, and through customer self-service. Staying in control of how products are sold is important for reputation, customer satisfaction and profitability. This is where your technology can help. Look for a platform with easy-to-use partner and customer portals.

Customer Segment
Automation

Not all customers are the same - this is the basic tenet of marketing and sales. As a result, we need to make sure we treat them as individuals (getting them the right inclusions and price, for example) but in a way that aligns with the company goals. Making it easy for sales teams to do that with individual autonomy rather than lengthy approval processes, as well as ensuring businesses can trust in the outcomes, can be done with the right system. Having automation and structured data in the subscription platform, like keylight's fully configurable rules to define the logic, are the way forward. Again, remember it's better to buy rather than custom build. If the subscription tech requires custom development, it's often more difficult and expensive than it seems.

People often associate subscription businesses with repeat revenue, and it is a characteristic of the business model. However, safeguarding those payments - making sure they're collected easily and on time - as well as retaining the customer relationship requires carefully considered and layered capabilities within your platform. It seems absurd that customers can be lost by accident, but they can, simply because the technology wasn't operating as it should. Here's what you need to look for.

Payment
Methods

Make sure the system allows for multiple payment methods. People can be easily put off if their payment method of choice isn't available to them, and different customer groups as well as different regions around the world have their own preferences or options they're used to. Make sure your system can connect to multiple payment gateways, offering different options by location, payment behavior, and other customer attributes with configurable rules and forms with custom fields.

Dunning Management &
Smart Retries

Payments can fail for all sorts of reasons - overzealous banking security, an out of date credit card and so forth. Making sure you're immediately alerted to a failed payment and that action is promptly taken to address it, but with the customer experience in mind, is important to help prevent losing revenue and customers accidentally. Dunning management is an automated payment recovery mechanism, which activates if a payment fails - it notifies the customer by email, text or an in-platform notification. This is often coupled with smart retry features to collect payment without antagonizing or upsetting the customer and thereby losing the relationship.

Failed
Payments

In addition to having dunning management and smart retries in place, you need to consider your protocols around failed payments within your system. What happens to the customer subscription when this happens? How many times will you permit the payment to fail before taking further actions? Automated processes in these scenarios are essential for both customer relationships and sustainable business management, especially as your organization grows and you develop a high volume of transactions to stay on top of. keylight has fully configurable rules for different payment scenarios to trigger the right email and document templates at the right time.

Subscription billing is the other side of the coin to your payment processes, and it's equally important when it comes to not only collecting payments but collecting accurate amounts at the right time. Billing needs to be integrated with the rest of the platform and the customer experience, provide strong reporting and analytics, and tailor billing to observed customer behaviors. Key features include:

Billing
Scenarios

Billing is the simple part of the subscription process, but what happens next can create complexity. To stay on top of things and keep them as seamless as possible, you need subscription technology that can handle the logic for subscription management as well as revenue recognition, which isn't quite as simple as it sounds. How billing is structured and executed can be instrumental both in terms of capturing, keeping and upselling to customers, helping to maximize their customer lifetime value as well as prevent revenue leakage through errors. Getting that process right for each individual requires a combination of uniformity and the capacity for customisation. To achieve that seamlessly you need a system that can respond to individual use cases quickly, easily and accurately, which is exactly what keylight's designed to do thanks to its rule-based, API-first approach.

Revenue
Recognition

Revenue recognition in subscription business is more complex than those offering one-off sales. While payments might be taken from customers upfront, they cannot be fully recognized and distributed across the business until the service has been delivered. As there is often a delay between payment and product/service delivery, it can mean revenue needs to be recalculated due to customer change requests between payment and delivery, for example. That means you need a system that aligns all that information and can make the necessary accounting changes automatically, doing complex calculations, including bundling and contract modifications.

Email &
Invoice Templates

This is where customer segmentation plays a significant role beyond that initial point of sale. Having the capacity to segment your email and invoice templates for tailored communications, and therefore a great customer billing experience will make a huge difference to successfully taking payments and retaining long-term customer relationships. 

For subscription businesses the opportunity to expand internationally often arises almost incidentally, when a request comes from a customer in another region. While it may be possible to fulfill that customer’s need in the initial instance, the temptation is to then grow in that area as a result. However, operating in different countries also adds complexity to the billing process. What’s important is that you have the tools within your system to support that decision by understanding your customers fully and executing that knowledge seamlessly against a clear and informed strategy - that’s what keylight seeks to do.

Multiple Currencies
Selling

Where the customer purchases, and which currency is being billed, will impact what's paid, any potential banking fees and how they're booked. When calculating currency conversion rates (which can change hourly), the date of invoicing also needs to be considered if it's different to the date of payment. In subscription businesses, which are set to repeat billing, that's especially important, as the rates need to be calculated and applied accurately for each bill, which might mean there are fluctuations in the fee. You need a system like keylight that natively supports multiple currencies (and languages) with direct integrations with global tax and accounting solutions that help businesses stay compliant at every stage of growth.

Customer
Portal

The customer portal, including the shop and checkout facilities, is where the customer can view their subscription plan, make payments or download invoices. When this portal is well-designed it can have a powerful impact on your business success. While it's tempting to custom design your customer portal, buying one that's ready made and purpose-built is both the fastest route to market and the best way to support your customers and your business, having already done all the research and worked out any teething issues. Your subscription platform should come with this fully prepared and ready to go.

Customer Journey

Localization

It's not just the currency that needs to be considered on a global and local level, but every other aspect of the customer journey as well. As with any online business, you can't simply pop the information in a translator and hope for the best. You need a platform that considers the whole customer journey from a regional market perspective. That means everything from offering the right language and time zone to the preferred payment option and even the formatting of dates and numbers. You need a system that adapts to regional differences automatically and seamlessly to optimize the customer experience.

Multi-Label
Capabilities

Translating themes, invoice templates and reporting to the appropriate region cannot be done manually and accurately, but most systems are not sophisticated enough to do it without error. You need a system with translation tables that allow you to translate all static text in the user interface, as well as dynamic text from the product catalog, e.g. names of products, rate plans, features, charges, etc.

Multi-Entity
Capacity

Similarly, different global regions impact internal necessities such as taxation compliance, data sovereignty, certifications and regulations, billing and accounting policies as well as reporting consolidation. To stay on top of things it helps if you use the same accounting tool across all business entities (keylight allows for multiple business entities). That means a system that can accommodate and automate everything you need - the different currencies, formatting, automation and so forth, so you can consolidate information accurately.