Typically, companies use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to enhance customer relationships, personalize communication, and build a long-term relationship with the customer. They also use it to identify quality leads, convert them into customers, increase sales, and address customer issues.
But there is one aspect of CRM that’s either less explored or relatively unknown. That’s the billing management.
Companies often treat bill management as an operational drill – i.e., companies send the bill, customers pay, and the process ends. What companies often forget is that bill management is a crucial part of customer experience. In the US, 33% of customers said they would consider switching if they are unhappy with the billing service.
These issues could range from errors in statements, wrong discount codes, mismanaged subscriptions, credit card expiry, errors in the renewal process, etc. Not many companies know – but these issues can be resolved using CRM.
Let’s look at why CRM is essential for billing management.
Why Is CRM Important to Deliver Superior Billing Experience?
1. Manage subscriptions
Companies have a tough time managing the various subscriptions of their customers while moving to the subscription pricing model. They need a system that ensures regular billing of customers with minimal supervision. Sometimes companies fail to renew the subscription of their customers on time, which results in unnecessary losses. That’s why a CRM-based billing platform is so important. Companies must invest in a modern CRM that allows them to include details such as the subscription details, date of renewal, billing details, the preferred mode of payment, etc. This will enable them to manage the subscriptions effectively. The CRM must also allow companies to add, cancel, renew, and update customer profiles and subscription plans. Armed with such comprehensive information about their customers, companies can personalize the subscription plans to deliver a good billing experience to customers.
2. Resolve tickets
Studies reveal that 88% of customers expect a response from companies within 60 minutes. Most of these queries are related to billing and payments. To ensure effective and fast query resolution, companies must invest in a good CRM with an in-built ticketing system. In-built ticketing allows customers to raise tickets quickly. The company’s service desk can record customer interactions and responses via different touchpoints. With defined SLAs for different types of queries, the most urgent ones can be resolved immediately without having the customer wait for a long time. To make it more effective, companies can also automate the ticketing process. So, the most common and basic questions can be resolved immediately with minimal human supervision. This will leave the customer less exasperated and anxious about their bills and subscriptions.
3. Engage and retain customers
Normally, the service teams are so involved in routine operational tasks that they hardly get time to cross-sell or upsell new products to existing customers. They are also unable to engage and retain customers or track those who show high intent of churning. An effective CRM-based billing platform will provide a real-time report on customer subscriptions and their interactions with the company. The real-time analysis will enable the company to understand how the customers think and behave and design strategies to enhance customer engagement. This will help reduce churn and cross-sell or upsell products to customers who intend to purchase more products.
4. Effective billing management
Companies focus most of their time on the initial sale. They pay less attention to the rest of the customer’s lifecycle. To provide a superior experience to customers, companies need to ensure that they offer a consistent billing experience throughout the lifecycle. This could range from onboarding the new customers into the system seamlessly to sending them regular communication on usage, renewals, expiry of subscription, etc. Using an automated subscription lifecycle management platform will help companies manage customer trials, issue refunds, and manage subscriptions effectively. The best part is that they can even make changes mid-cycle, which boosts the customer’s confidence.
Conclusion
We live in a consumption economy that has grown tremendously over the past decade. Even companies that used traditional payment methods are switching to the subscription model as it offers predictable revenue and improves their ROI. However, managing the subscriptions of different customers can be quite challenging. There is also an additional responsibility of managing and onboarding new customers. A good CRM helps companies to manage these challenges and the end-to-end revenue generation experience effectively.
OneBill has built a robust and integrated CRM platform that helps to deliver a seamless billing experience to customers.
The CRM helps to:
- Create, manage, and update customer subscriptions and even upgrade or downgrade them based on customer demands
- Raise and manage tickets and record customer responses across different touchpoints
- Empower customers to manage their subscriptions and invoices in a single platform
- Enable the customers to quickly complete the checkout process by selecting the products, pricing, and signing up for the subscription
To know more about how to improve the billing experience of customers, contact us.
