Guide | Maximize Subscription Customer Lifetime Value

In B2B subscription businesses, customer self-service is often conflated with customer support instead of genuinely giving consumers autonomy over their purchase and experience. For example, providing FAQs so that customers can solve problems themselves or submit tickets to resolve issues.

At keylight, customer self-service is seen as a part of the sales process and contributes to the entirety of the long-term customer relationship. Revenue opportunities can be generated through timely engagement across the customer lifecycle.

By allowing customers to subscribe and interact with their own subscriptions, including upgrades, downgrades, changing terms, managing invoices and purchasing add ons, the following benefits are unlocked:

The challenge
Many B2B subscription businesses prefer a direct sales approach to the customer journey. In the mindset that’s fearful of giving customers too much autonomy, the business misses opportunities to sell more and retain the customer. Without proper self-service options, customers need to invest more time getting in touch with the organization, which leaves them highly vulnerable to being pushed into another sales cycle. The inconvenience of a lack of autonomy creates emotional barriers and friction in the customer relationship.

The impact

The keylight solution
Think about self-service as a two-way engagement with customers – pulling the customer to the business instead of pushing them to enter the sales process. By giving customers the power to interact with their own subscriptions, thereby helping to facilitate their own commercial goals, what you gain is a much healthier customer relationship, and far greater insights with digital touchpoints. The key is to create a well-designed self-service environment and use data to take actions at the right time.

The challenge
Integrating customer self-service into the software architecture is not easy, especially when it involves enabling self-service upgrades, downgrades and contract changes. Whether building self-service options from scratch or integrating with a commerce portal, it takes ceaseless development effort around the standard CRM, billing and ERP systems. Even if that hefty maintenance and development roadmap are managed, your teams will still be inhibited by an incomplete understanding of the customer without a single point at which all information is gathered to give them a complete picture to take the right actions.

The impact

The challenge
With a direct sales approach, prioritizing customers by deal amount, product line, organizational size or region is often manual but manageable. The challenge occurs when automating the different customer journeys. The businesses’ experiences and offerings need to diversify to communicate the right price values for each segment. However, to roll out, test and optimize these journeys with finance-driven systems is opening a Pandora’s box of customization and workaround challenges.

The impact

The challenge
The most common ways customer portals are used are for customers to view their subscription plans, make payments or download invoices. Allowing customers to upgrade, downgrade or cancel by themselves is often overly complex because of the billing impact, not to mention enabling communication of new product updates and directing customers to conversion for free trials or discount campaigns. Not only does this imply a lack of technological capability and innovation, it’s also often where competitive offerings come forth.

The impact

The keylight solution
Buy a capable system with 90% of the required features available out-of-the-box and customize the last 10% to deliver great experiences on your customer self-service roadmap. Portals are a vital part of achieving effective self-service capability objectives, knitting together the customer and business needs, and helping to increase conversion rates as a result. It is important to start with a subscription engine that is not finance-driven but rather one that is built for dynamic user interactions.

The keylight solution
An event-driven approach is needed to capture every action your prospects and customers are performing throughout self-service journeys and in the customer portal. Additionally, use one central system to collect logical data. The prolonged customer relationship from subscription models gives businesses time to understand the customers across all lifecycle stages. The valuable behavioral data can also be used to innovate products and reduce risks in customer churn, experimentation, revenue flow and market expansion.

Read on to discover the five most common challenges to implementing customer self-service in B2B subscription businesses