This summer, we were thrilled to host a webinar with PwC on how businesses can leverage billing to drive customer satisfaction and revenue growth in the rapidly evolving monetization landscape. The webinar included insights from three expert panelists:

• Jared Schreff, Partner, Finance Transformation, PwC
• Laurie Fleet, Partner, Quote-to-Cash Transformation, PwC
• Sean Daniel, Chief Financial Offer, Gotransverse

During the 45-minute webinar, the speakers shared rich insights into what leaders need to consider in order to leverage their billing system to drive or maintain competitive advantages in this dynamic market. We shared the highlights in a recent blog post (and you can view the full replay here), but today we want to focus on one of Jared Schreff’s key points:

In a landscape where customer experience is paramount, there’s a lot businesses have to get right.

In a post-COVID world, he noted, customers are protecting their finances and shifting their priorities in search of businesses that offer easy purchase and enhanced customer service experience, significant value for their time and money, and products and services that meet their evolving needs at every turn. To meet these demands — and to ensure the frictionless experience customers demand from the brands they patronize — Schreff broke down eight areas SaaS businesses should be focusing on in their monetization process.

Customer Lifetime Value — Beyond the Initial Sale

While the initial sale is critical the reality is that 80 percent of customer lifetime value occurs after the initial sale. That means, said Schreff, that businesses need to be focusing on a seamless end-to-end process, including automated contract changes and other workflows that make it easy to retain customers after that first purchase.

Customer Centric Focus

“We have to be customer centric now more than ever,” said Schreff, “and rich customer data is key to being able to do that.”

Chief among these data sets, for businesses looking to be more customer centric in their outward facing communication and sales efforts, is subscriber purchase history. What have subscribers bought in the past, and what additional (relevant, engaging, and personalized) value can we offer them based on historical preferences?

Revenue Driven by Customer Value

Additionally, deep insights into customer usage and outcomes are a powerful tool for growing customer value and driving revenue. When you understand how your customers are using your products and services, you can create new offerings, bundles, pricing schemes, etc. as cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Gotransverse CFO Sean Daniel added that usage data is about more than selling more products. “Even if you don’t use it as a monetization technique,” he said, “it provides a lot of information on how your customer is using your services and your product, and those can be early indicators that something isn’t right. It could be something inside the business…but it might be something beyond that that indicates you might need to touch base with the customer.”

Continuous Customer Engagement

Customer demands change rapidly — and change the business landscape with them — driving the pace of business faster than ever, which means that, in order to keep customers engaged with your brand, it’s critical to be able to launch new and valuable products quickly. For many businesses operating on outdated monetization platforms, this is a significant challenge that leads to lost sales and retention opportunities.

Renewals

The goal with renewals, said Schreff, is to make them “as much of a nonevent as possible” while using customer usage data to take advantage of cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Creating workflows that enable accurate and automated renewals — for a variety of price points and timelines — removes the friction that might cause a customer to cancel rather than renew. And adding further workflows that support sales teams with usage history provides the business the opportunity to grow many accounts during that renewal window.

Retention

Retention has always been important. But now, with many customers buying habits changed as a result of the pandemic, predicting and preventing churn is more critical than ever. As customers are taking a careful look at where their money is going — and where their value is coming from — businesses need to be able to identify the behaviors that may hint at upcoming churn and take action to reengage and retain customers. “Being able to predict that in usage environments tends to be focused on declining usage,” said Schreff. “In a straight subscription environment, it’s focused on missed pays and late pays as indicators for where [churn] events may take place.” Transparent, up-to-date usage data is a goldmine in this effort.

Efficient Growth

Many legacy billing systems require significant human intervention to accomplish any growth-related processes, from customer deals to new products to pricing updates. These internal logjams inevitably make their way to the customer experience. With the right platform in place, empowering segmented deal flows, low-touch/high-velocity processes, customer segmentation, and more, efficient growth and fabulous customer experience go hand-in-hand.

Seamless Buying Experience

Finally, with customers buying through a variety of channels — in-person, online, from mobile devices or laptops — it’s imperative that businesses enable omnichannel buying experiences. Schreff encourages leaders to examine whether their billing systems can accommodate all the channels through which their businesses are selling products and services. If not, it may be time for a change.

The demand for a seamless customer experience — and the stakes for businesses meeting that demand — are higher than ever. There is a lot that corporate leaders have to get right if they want to help their companies stay ahead, and the right billing system can make or break those efforts. At Gotransverse, we pride ourselves on helping our clients implement a billing system that empowers growth, drives revenue, and creates a frictionless customer experience every step of the way. To find out whether our platform is right for your organization, we invite you to take a virtual tour of our billing platform today. Then, when you’re ready, request a demo to learn more.