How SaaS Companies Can Enrich Customer Loyalty and Long-Lasting Relationships with Recurring Billing During COVID-19

With the current COVID-19 crisis, businesses are concerned for their customer base. For subscription-based business models where recurring revenue is the main source of growth, companies are looking towards recurring billing software to help in maintaining their operations with automation. From online payments to recurring renewals, SubscriptionFlow has helped businesses maintain their customer relationships. With the changing times, industry trends have placed customer relationship management at the centre of business growth. This is why SaaS metrics and key performance indicators used to measure revenue and subscription growth revolve around customer experience and lifetime value. Recently, with the rise of recurring billing and subscription management software, your business must be more focused on maintaining customer loyalty which is directly linked with churn rate. If your customers are receiving value-added service. By maintaining customer loyalty, companies experience better retention and lower churn rate as well as improvement in other metrics.

However, since the global pandemic has enforced lockdown, SaaS companies are now concerned with reducing churn rate as many customers might refrain from paying for their subscriptions. So how can you, as a SaaS business generate and maintain customer loyalty to ensure a long-lasting customer relationship? SubscriptionFlow believes that companies can maintain brand loyalty just with recurring billing software and some tools which will ensure customer relief in these trying times. Survival during a global pandemic for SaaS companies can be challenging but with the right tools, you can maintain loyalty and better customer relationships.

Communication is the key to Maintaining Customer Relationship

The goal here is to drive more purchases, possible upgrades, or maintain subscriptions against cancellations or downgrades. As this time is more temporary, SaaS businesses and even small entrepreneurs should focus more on maintaining communication with clients in a more humane manner, ensure quality services, put forth communication chains via emails to inform your customers about any necessary changes, and also launch sizeable campaigns for sales, or discounts. Mostly it is believed that sales and discounts in these times are beneficial and enough for you to maintain customer loyalty and to make your customers happy, which is not true. Although recurring billing and software will prove beneficial for discounts and easily managing subscription, you need to focus communication with your customer base to ensure that you care for their dire financial situation and also come up with plans for working remotely with your teams.

This will help your business maintain a seamless flow of service and operations. Now, communication with your team, especially customer-facing teams like sales, customer support, service, and marketing representatives is important as it will assure uninterrupted service to your clients. For this purpose, you can use project management tools like Trello or Kanban boards for maintaining the flow of leads and proposals, invoicing, billing, and customer relationship management from recurring billing software. Once you have communicated with your team members and set up a schedule for working remotely, you must also devise a marketing, sales, and customer relationship management strategy for reaching out to customers.

Flexible Discounts and Subscriptions for your Customers

For this purpose, you can offer to pause or postponing subscriptions. Using recurring billing software like SubscriptionFlow, you can easily extend the period of next renewal to indefinite or extend that period to another date. This way your customers will not hastily cancel their subscription and you will not have to send email reminders to your customers for failed payments. This is a good way for you to avoid inconveniencing your customers and more likely to receive payments on your subscriptions when their next renewals take place.

When it comes to trial periods, it is possible that some of your customers have not upgraded yet prior to the lockdown. For them, you can offer an extended trial period so your customers can rethink their cancellation and ultimately upgrade to a paid version. Moreover, for sales and discounts, our users do not have to worry about invoicing as the checkout page takes account of discount codes or coupons for their loyal customers automatically. All in all, recurring billing if used in the right manner has a lot of potentials for SaaS companies to sail through these trying times. With SubscriptionFlow, you will not only feel ease and convenience but improvement in customer relationships and loyalty as well.