Guide | Omnichannel Strategy Made Simple

However, with either of the solutions, businesses will face interminable challenges along the way. Billing systems and subscription management platforms were built with a financial focus and cannot accommodate the ever-evolving use cases in a progressively digital world.

While it’s possible to solve these challenges by expanding the budget and the team to build a customized solution that more or less serves the purpose, an excessive amount of effort is constantly required for businesses to reach their goals. The complexity of the projects not only sores the teams, but also the competitiveness of the entire business.

The challenge
Legacy platforms are typically designed for one-off product sales and finance transactions instead of the dynamic relationship between subscription models and their customers. They don’t provide native solutions to differentiate between trial customers and paying customers. This is because digital commerce solutions cannot accommodate the number of nurture events across the subscriber lifecycle. Enabling opportunities to cross-sell, amend, downgrade, pause, or reactivate subscriptions are already complicated enough to customize, not to mention collecting the right data that enables relevant engagement with customers at the right time along the customer journey.

The impact

The challenge
The volume of work and level of investment needed to make a legacy platform satisfactory typically requires long lead times. It’s slow to launch and cannot be innovative as business and customer needs evolve with new insights continuously. With legacy subscription billing systems, even a campaign of limited magnitude will take weeks to implement due to decoupled systems and their rigid dependencies. As a result, this prohibits your business from proactively reacting to market shifts and ever-changing customer expectations.

The impact

Subscription Success Cycle

A single model and mindset for all business processes and systems

A mindset shift
Don‘t only try to sell products and services, but create experiences and relationships.

Iterative approach
The complexity of the model requires iterative thinking and development.

Data
Use data to optimize customer journey and pricing models.

The challenge
One of the most disheartening challenges of legacy systems is that the challenges don’t decrease over time. As your business matures, the problems only become more challenging and acute. Success often comes with expansion into new countries or markets. Product catalogs need translation, customer journeys, accounting requirements, and even payment processes need adaptations to countries or industries. Legacy and composite subscription systems cannot support these requirements, ever. IT departments have to juggle complicated workarounds, maintenance, and new business incentives.

The impact

The challenge
Projects to connect commerce channels with a billing system spiral out of control as service budgets accumulate to an outrageous level over implementation that spans years. They could fail ultimately due to the seemingly simple individual requirements businesses need to differentiate themselves from competitors. Legacy subscription management platforms are not only still built for minimal standards but also have poor extensibility. Internal teams become strained due to lengthy projects and have no time to develop features that honor the business value and experience that is interesting for the end customers.

The impact

Read on about the five most common subscription commerce challenges and our solutions

A single model and mindset for all business processes and systems

The subscription trinity