One of the key objectives of every digital transformation exercise is automation. This is true irrespective of the type of business. Be it telecom to media, utilities, finance, etc. several complex business workflows become automated with the aid of a seamless digital strategy. From automated supply chains to customer on-boarding, the impact of automation has increased tremendously over the past decade.
However, there are areas where companies have yet to make progress in this regard, such as automation of financial processes like billing. Studies suggest that nearly 59% of companies face severe customer challenges due to problems in their billing experience. Billing is a key element of customer experience. It is something that every business needs to master – especially while competing in an era of subscriptions found nearly everywhere from entertainment to grocery shopping.
Read: 4 Major Reasons Why CRM Is Essential to Offering a Superior Billing Experience
Businesses that want to offer their products and services in a recurring fashion need to invest in empowering customers with a seamless autonomous billing experience. They also need to manage their own finances with better revenue management. Rather than relying on legacy, manual, effort-intensive internal billing mechanisms or building an amateur billing system on their own, enterprises must evaluate leading digital billing platforms that offer nearly all forms of billing that customers prefer today.
Read: The Many Benefits of New-Gen Billing Platforms
Let us look at how providing the right billing experience can result in more customer loyalty:
Offers Support to Recurring Billing
For subscription-based services, which are increasingly gaining fanfare in several sectors, the business entity can utilize a powerful digital billing platform to autonomously manage their revenue cycle every month or on the set subscription timeline. The platform can manage the generation of invoices, sharing of invoices with the customer via their preferred communication links such as SMS or email, and collect payments and update the same in the revenue records of the company. This entire process becomes a seamless activity enabling fewer hassles for the customers as well as the company’s finance team. It also helps in reducing errors and data integrity issues when compared to manual management of the billing experience that is followed by most traditional organizations.
Highly Customizable Options
The beauty of subscriptions is that any business service or product can be sold with highly flexible payment terms. For customers, this gives them the much-needed financial relief by not having to incur a huge expense for a one-time purchase. However, accommodating this flexibility requires extensive customizations for the billing and revenue management practices as well. Traditional billing solutions do not support such advanced levels of pricing configurations and customer revenue management. This is where modern-day SaaS billing solutions can make a difference. Such platforms offer flexible rule engines that can be customized to launch a personalized subscription plan for any of the customers. Once set, the rest is automated and both customers and the finance team in the business can get an overall better experience.
Accommodate Diverse Payments
Today, more diverse payment options are available for a customer than there were 2 decades ago. A modern billing solution will ensure that your customers have access to all their preferred choice of payments for the subscription plans they choose. From collecting the payment to reconciliation, every step of the contracting and revenue collection journey can be automated by onboarding a powerful digital platform for billing. As more customers, irrespective of age groups and demographic choices, start to opt for subscription-based services, these platforms can offer them a host of payment choices like integration with their favorite digital wallets, direct bank transfer, split payments, loyalty point redemption, and much more.
Building Relationships not Invoices
Managing the subscription lifecycle is also easier with these digital platforms as they allow easy modification, cancellations, and renewals of subscriptions to suit the unique needs of target customers. By thoroughly engaging with customers, brands can build a trusted relationship through their seamless billing experience and not just limit the conversation to fixed invoices and payment reconciliation. It allows sales personnel to negotiate new contracts or renewals easily with existing customers and engage them continuously with tailored offers to keep them loyal to the brand. The ease with such modern billing platforms offer customized billing plans makes them a formidable sales weapon for an organization to help close deals quickly.
Building a successful subscription-based pricing model for services is key to remain competitive in the digital economy. As more businesses realize this fact, the next focus item is to stay ahead in an increasingly crowded market for subscription-based services.
For this, offering a superlative customer experience is a key element that needs to reflect in all aspects of interaction a business has with customers – ranging from onboarding to billing. Building your own billing software or relying on legacy billing processes will not help in accelerating the digital experience in this regard. Investing in a powerful SaaS-based subscription billing platform that helps you manage customer subscriptions effortlessly with a high degree of automation is what is needed at this point in time to succeed.
OneBill is more than a billing platform. It’s an intelligent end-to-end revenue management tool to power your business. Take a demo today!