Probably the most common interactions that customers have with a subscription service are billing related.
This isn’t really surprising because billing touches almost every point in the customer life cycle including:
- creating an account,
- ordering,
- making changes,
- paying for the account,
- receiving invoices, statements,
- managing payment information, credit cards,
- and so on.
Up 40% of inbound calls received by a support team can be billing related. On top of that roughly 50% of customer churn relates to payment related information, most often credit cards that expire or fail because recurring payments weren’t properly processed.
Those are big numbers, and they deal with something really, REALLY important –the customer experience. We all know that happy customers are not only loyal customers but brand ambassadors: they tell their friends; they like you on Facebook; they recommend you – AND they keep buying from you. This is why many businesses put a lot of emphasis on designing a customer experience that includes lifecycle emails focused on strengthening this relationship.
However, while many businesses take the time to create and implement customer experience emails, they often either overlook or ignore the ad hoc billing pieces being sent out automatically by various software programs they use to conduct their day to day business. For example, your sales or support team may use a CRM that has automated emails built into it, another program generates receipts, something comes from QuickBooks, something comes from your payment processor, and something comes from your ordering system, and so on. These are communication points reaching your customers that are outside of your carefully designed customer experience.
For example, in a previous business I ran, we put a lot of focus on managing the customer experience, but there were these nasty collection emails being sent out from a system we used that was buried somewhere deep in the accounting department. While effective in collecting money, it certainly was not a customer experience that anybody had designed.
Finding and managing all of these emails in all of these different systems can be a daunting task, which is why people often just ignore them. You know they’re there, and you know they are hurting your customer experience, but you pretend they don’t exist.
But trying to centralize and manage all of the communications is an important part of the customer interaction that will lead to your business being more successful, so it’s time to acknowledge and get rid of the elephant in the room.
One way to get rid of those ad hoc emails is by automating the management of the customer life-cycle from the beginning until the very end of the relationship – including all of the billing activities. Next, make sure all of your customer communications have a consistent tone and character suitable to your brand. Automation is really important because when processes are not automated, they can slip through the cracks, and you get an inconsistent customer experience.
We’ll go into the different ways to do this in future posts so stay tuned!
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