The subscription business model has evolved from simple recurring orders to diverse product-price offerings to monetize long-term customer relationships. In order to build strong relationships with customers, the user interactions and experiences along the customer journey need to be in focus when constructing the subscription ecosystem.

Many subscription businesses find themselves blocked by technological limitations in keeping up with modern strategies, especially those who use a traditional billing platform as the focal point to orchestrate complex subscription activities. While connecting more specialized tools for commerce, payments, customer retention, or data may seem straightforward to complement what is missing in billing-driven solutions, as the business grows, integrations and custom development become increasingly expensive and time-consuming—it’s a bottomless pit.

In a subscription business, change is constant. It’s a competitive space that requires a shift in mindset combined with carefully curated technologies in order to pivot and evolve to survive and thrive. In this guide, we will walk you through five best practices to modernize your subscription ecosystem and prepare for the next phase of growth.

Your subscription business journey starts with users—both your customers and the internal teams operating within the business. The experience should be seamless and enjoyable for customers, enabling them to easily find what they need and complete transactions. Sales reps, partners, customer success teams, system admins, developers, and product and finance teams need to collaborate smoothly for effective operations.

Where billing-driven ecosystems often fail to streamline the complexity of processes for each user group and adapt to dynamic models, a user-centric approach integrating billing and finance into the customer journey can lead to stronger business outcomes.

Change is a challenge both financially and psychologically, which is why many organizations opt for the status quo. If you have already invested a lot of financial resources into the customization of a legacy billing system, it can be painful to consider shifting to a dedicated subscription platform. Businesses that are considering a transition to modern technologies may also worry that historical data on the customers will be lost during the migration. So, why rock the boat?

The subscription business model is a continuous monetization of long-term customer relationships. In order to show value to customers constantly, different departments need to work much closer together and the responsibilities of each technology in the ecosystem can not be clearly separated. Without a modern framework, piecing old and new tools together creates high expenses that could be invested in product development, customers, and operational strategies.

Subscription technologies need a fundamental change—structurally, strategically, and in terms of mindset; your team always has to be looking forward.

User experience, automation, and predictive analytics are the three pivots in your subscription ecosystem. Over the years we have seen various types of systems being used as the foundation of subscription businesses, such as CRM, ERP, CMS, or invoice automation tools. However, these systems are not purposely built to natively accommodate the ever-evolving customer journeys and complex operations across departments at scale. As the business grows, not only does success become more expensive to sustain, but winning new customers gets harder because of a legacy infrastructure that slows down business innovation.

One Unified Framework

Subscription Trinity

Facilitate change and innovation with a user-centric mindset and a modern technology foundation.

User Experience

Users must feel good when interacting with the subscription systems and your business. End-customers should be able to manage their own subscriptions effortlessly and internal teams should not feel the complexity to create better experiences for the end-customers.

Automation

The architecture must work end-to-end for everyone. This allows you to maximize revenue, business growth and cost efficiency by streamlining cumbersome manual tasks so your teams can focus on higher value areas.

Predictive Analytics

Data must capture the right dynamics to understand customers. Besides financial reports, a structured approach to collect data along the continuous customer journey is crucial to prevent churn and win new business.

Adaptability is an essential characteristic of a successful subscription business. Once you have a flexible playground such as keylight in place, you can draft out concrete plans to test what works for which customers. Are add-ons more likely to be purchased when displayed with main products, upon checkout or three weeks after conversion? Should they have the same price point at different touchpoints? Do your customers want be automatically upgraded to a higher tier when their usage is full, or only after their term ends; and which option would drive more revenue for your business?

Looking beyond revenue recovery processes, customer journeys and pricing are the most prominent aspects that impact conversion, retention and as as result, your profitibility. The customer experience and customer value should set your business apart and build trust that leads to a robust customer relationship.

As subscription businesses grow, their complexity increases rapidly. Traditional billing tools often require extensive customization to support modern revenue strategies and meet both customer and internal user needs. Without modern subscription expertise, these tools can result in high development costs for basic strategies or compromise usability, creating obstacles for businesses that wish to scale quickly and sustainably.

With a traditional ecosystem as such, experimenting in new markets or channels become cumbersome and costly projects with high risk, as the amount of customizations accumulates. Modern subscription businesses need a modern and capable framework to build an ecosystem that is agile and adaptable.

Read on to discover our low-risk approach to building a future-proof subscription ecosystem.

Subscription Trinity

Read on to discover our low-risk approach to building
a future-proof subscription ecosystem.