Using CRM to Manage Subscriptions and Renewals

Subscription management is the process of managing the lifecycle of a customer’s subscription from start to finish. Many companies, like those in the software or media and publishing industries, use subscription models to adopt a recurring purchase system.

If you’re interested in or currently using this model, then this article will show you how to make subscription CRM (customer relationship management) software work for your business in the most effective way.

What is subscription management?

Subscription management is the system of managing a business’ subscribers, including each customer’s preferences throughout the lifecycle.

Effective management involves many tasks, such as overseeing the customer sign-up process, managing potential renewal opportunities, and ensuring customers are supported through to the end of their lifecycle, including handling cancellations.

A subscription model offers several benefits to a business: it is an excellent way to build predictable revenue, can help increase customer retention rates, and reduce marketing and acquisition costs over time.

However, managing a subscription model can have its challenges. It’s often difficult to keep track of the numerous customers, their information, renewal periods, potential upgrades, transaction histories and communications.

As a result, businesses interested in managing a subscription model must be willing to invest in the proper tools and software necessary to help alleviate the administrative burdens associated with it. Subscription management software features can significantly ease these challenges and optimize the entire process.

Challenges of subscription and renewal management

Billing errors, ensuring timeliness of renewals, and keeping track of potential customer concerns — which could influence renewals — are the most common challenges that arise with subscription and renewal management. Furthermore, there are also challenges associated with keeping track of various interactions customers have during subscription periods as well as the numerous KPIs which should be monitored and the collection process associated with them.

Despite the vigilance of companies, mistakes can often take a long time to even get noticed. In some cases, the business suffers substantial losses with expenditures not only involving identifying and correcting the errors but also rectifying a damaged relationship with the customer.

Hence, you have to pour significant resources and focus into billing and tracking a broad subscription base — an undertaking that requires incredible accuracy and endless follow-ups to make the most of the time and money invested. And technology can be a great enabler in that area.

Leveraging CRM to support subscription and renewal management

CRM and subscription management can seamlessly complement each other. CRM focuses on the interactions between you and its customers, assisting with the actual management of customers and storing a wealth of information including their subscriptions, preferences and interactions with the business. Moreover, it can provide you with valuable data and insights that can influence important strategic business decisions and relationships with customers.

A powerful CRM solution must be able to automate the majority of the subscription and renewal management process as well as deliver all the pertinent data necessary for a straightforward process. For instance, some organizations automatically send out renewal notifications to consumers with expiring contracts. Meanwhile, others send these reminders to their Account Managers instead to trigger actions that will help them reach out to their customers about the renewals on time.

Aside from managing subscriptions and renewals, a CRM platform can also be used to alert business owners to fundamental milestones throughout the lifecycle of a subscription. This allows a member of the team to check in on a customer every quarter or even monthly to establish that both are still on the same page and that the customer is receiving value from the subscription. The obvious advantage of this is the avoidance of any surprise when renewal time comes.

Let’s see some other benefits of implementing CRM software to manage a business’ subscriptions and renewals:

Automation

The need to contact a vast number of clients to ensure recurring payments can be a headache — the type that can result in loss of valuable time, particularly for finance teams. With a CRM solution, businesses can implement an automation process that will automatically draft and send invoices on designated dates. This is crucial in ensuring that clients remain on board.

Automation also eliminates the necessity to personally reach out to every customer every time their renewal period comes up. Customers should also appreciate this offered convenience — they’ll likely find it preferable if a business can provide the products or services that they intend to regularly purchase without the need to re-enter or go through the lengthy and sometimes tedious sales process over and over.

Personalized service

More and more customers demand personalization from the companies that they do business with. This means flexible terms and plans to accommodate the varying requirements of every paying client. With data gathered from a reliable CRM platform, it’s easy to set personalized billing terms for each customer.

Analytics from the behavior of individual consumers can also be useful in establishing a workable and agreeable billing frequency for all parties. For instance, the sales team can conveniently track any “at-risk” clients and take remedial action before things escalate. The business can analyze client data to gain a more defined idea of who their customers are and what they truly want or expect.

You can also forge better relationships with their customers and gain access to a demographic that has already expressed interest and commitment to the products and services they offer. A business can eventually tap into this population for reliable feedback and even new offers.

Guaranteed accuracy

Customers who sign up for subscriptions are some of the most important clients in every business. Unfortunately, a single mistake with regards to billing, renewals, upgrades or accurately tracking and collecting valuable customer feedback or KPIs could undo months or even years of a good relationship with a customer and lead to losing them.

With CRM software in place, information used for subscriptions and renewals is stored against each customer. This ensures that subsequent transactions proceed smoothly, with tools like auto-populating fields guaranteeing an error-free and straightforward process.

Final thoughts

Convincing customers to sign up for regular subscriptions is a great way for a business to create a stable and predictable revenue stream and drive strong customer lifetime value. However, subscriptions and renewals can be a challenge to manage, track and maintain. As a result, you need to establish an underlying infrastructure and leverage CRM effectively to support subscription management so that it can be used most effectively and efficiently.

Streamline your subscription management with Workbooks

Is your business drowning in subscription data? Are you struggling to keep track of renewals, cancellations, and customer preferences?

Workbooks can help. Our powerful subscription management system streamlines the entire process, from onboarding new customers to recurring billing and automated renewals. We handle all the admin tasks you don’t have time for, so you can focus on delivering exceptional service and building strong customer relationships.
For complete peace of mind, consider Workbooks’ Managed Service. With Managed Service, a team of experts will handle all the admin tasks you don’t have time for, including data import, automation setup, and ongoing CRM support.

Get in touch with us to learn more about the Workbooks CRM platform today.