When it comes to modern business, customer experience and service is at the forefront of most conversations pertaining to everything from product development to sales strategies to crisis management tactics. Consumers today have immense power, and we all must adapt to this new landscape, or risk failing due to a lack of buyer confidence or loyalty.
For SaaS companies, you may actually be the best poised to offer true customer value, and you can actually ensure it by managing your subscriptions better. Here's how:
Better control of master data gives better insights
In order to exercise comprehensive subscription management, you must have proper control over your master data. What this means is ensuring you have streamlined sources of data, and you're tracking the right types of data points for having true indicators of how both your offerings and your users are performing.
Control over master data is necessary for customer service, as it allows your business to be more agile and respond in real-time to the needs of your users. Without subscription management in this instance, you may miss time-sensitive opportunities.
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Subscription management contributes to oversight of customer lifecycles
Better subscription management also means that you have a better oversight of your customer lifecycles, and can identify where each of your users are within that lifecycle at any given point in time. This is crucial for the delivery of the services and customer support that users will associate with better customer experiences. But also, it presents opportunities for upsells and add-ons that can simultaneously benefit your bottom line and make customers feel that their needs are being met.
When understanding where a customer is in their lifecycle, you can more easily prevent customers from churning, or be ready to address new and different needs they may have as their company, and yours, evolves. Having this kind of overview for each customer allows you to better service them where they are depending on their needs - a true value driver that will not go unnoticed.
Subscription management helps product development
We all build our products to solve common (or maybe not-so common) problems that users in our industries encounter. That driving force for most SaaS companies shouldn't be lost as soon as we become profitable. Better subscription management and data insights can help us to better understand how our customers use our products, and where they may be gaps in services we haven't yet thought of.
Great businesses rely on customers to help identify upcoming needs or provide ideas for development. Of course some companies are really good at creating a need and then filling it, all on their own, but with subscription businesses, you don't actually have to work that hard. If you can properly manage your usage data, financial reporting, and portfolio of offerings together, you can more easily see the natural progression of where your development roadmap should go.
Developing products for what your customers want and need is one of the surest ways to better service them, since it shows that you care about how they use your products and that you respond to their wants and needs.
