Innovative Subscription Models to Come with the Help of Self-service Capabilities

Self-service is rapidly becoming the important factor of the customer support function for subscription-based business models. The customer experience (CX) is an important component of today’s subscription revolution. It is becoming even more important to focus on the needs of the individual subscriber as more and more businesses move towards a subscription-based recurring revenue model. Only a happy customer paves the way for a successful subscription-based business at a time when customers are spoilt for choice.

There has been a rapid increase in the number of Netflix-like successful subscription-based models with simplified services and products globally in the year 2020. With the help of these similar principles, Internet service providers (ISPs) can attract new customers in a crowded market with easy hop-on/hop-off products that come with full control of spending, especially on consumption and additional services. 

If you allow your subscribers to access information, make purchase decisions, and troubleshoot their problems on their own accord can be very beneficial for your business. Your support executive may not be available 24/7, but a self-service model ensures that your customer is engaged at all times.

Inspiration From The Big OTT Players

The self-service subscription model is exactly the model chosen by popular OTT services such as Uber, Netflix, and Airbnb, each of which built their whole business model on easy-to-use apps and digital portals. 

The key to success for either startups or top-valued global companies was and always remains the best user experience. The whole digital approach has made the recent innovations even more popular. For instance, customers can get on the spot help from chatbots, or receive AI/ML-powered recommendations based on profiling and previous choices.

First Impressions Are Important

As said, the first impression is the last impression. A successful subscription model offers a seamless user experience, from onboarding to offer and option selection, cost-control, and payment. According to this, the onboarding process is essential for the success of the whole service offer. It is of utmost importance that all customer-facing processes in this approach should be designed carefully as well as must be widely simplified and clear. 

Self-Service For Subscription Model Benefits

Drive Efficiency

 With the help of analytics, your support team can easily identify the key areas in which customers seek product information. Either in the form of FAQs or a detailed knowledge base, an easy-to-access and comprehensive information repository, can help free up your resources to create more valuable touch-points for your customers.

Improve Overall Product Experience

By identifying the functions with the help of software insights for which customers access your self-service resources, you will be able to identify your product’s strengths and weaknesses. This will help you in enhancing the self-service capabilities, resolving issues as well as improving the overall product experience.

Improve Customer-to-Staff Interactions

With self-service in place for daily subscription management activities, your support executives can then focus on having more meaningful conversations with subscribers and improved outcomes. The customer support team can use direct engagement methods to onboard customers, explore up-selling/cross-selling opportunities, build deeper customer relationships or pacify aggrieved customers.

Reduce Customer Churn

Businesses ensure that customers gain information or resolve their problems anytime, anywhere by giving the power to the subscribers. Some subscribers will always prefer the traditional phone call to a customer services team, but others prefer a DIY online approach. You can build loyalty and reduce customer churn by giving the power of choice to consumers.

Reduce Dependency 

Problems and queries can come without any prior notice, and it’s not always possible for someone from your organization to be available to help. Robust self-service software helps you to reduce the dependency, while also ensuring that your subscribers are not left out in the cold. To make sure that customers can always get the best service whenever it is required, you should always try to build and expand self-service capabilities.

The Future Of Successful Subscription Models

A perfect example of innovation opening a whole new market scenario is the emergence of innovative subscription models in telcos. If we think that that having an eSIM-enabled device makes it possible for customers to start using telco offers within minutes, and without a single human interaction, it is clear that such an approach will be appealing for many clients, especially younger ones. 

Everything becomes online due to the covid-19 even the offline stores work online as a result customers have already understood how much time they can save by using the intuitive app instead of making time-consuming store visits.

According to our prediction, this mindset-changing technology will achieve popularity throughout the year, and more operators globally will be launching such offers and apps, aligned to their local market specifics. Simultaneously, with ongoing globalization, we also predict that this new business model will mean it will be picked up by new players because of its growing popularity.

Thus, we can expect an explosion of:

• Subscription-based contract model for the main service and all options
• Seamless customer experience, especially for onboarding and management
• More simple and clear systems for customers on the contract level

If we conclude from the viewpoint of the ISPs, the market offers have never appeared more interesting. One thing is sure that the customers will have a large choice of options. ISPs need to ensure they are the ones chosen.

We at Height8 are always market-ready and will help you deliver the best solution as required by the market scenario.

Contact us for a demo of our H8 Cloud-based ISP Solution by mailing us on h8ssrms@height8tech.com or calling us on +91-79 40089216.

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