Advantages of Offering Self-Service Portals for Your Subscribers

There are many perks of using a subscription management platform. Especially one that gives you state of the art features as well as the liberty to integrate anything you want.

Since these features aim to streamline your business processes, you can expect them to decrease the amount of time you have to spend doing repetitive tasks.

One of the most important aspects of a subscription business that provides monthly or yearly products/services is customer support.

Not only is it integral to the working of the business, but it’s also crucial for its development and growth. Needless to say, you can’t have a good brand identity if you are renowned for not responding well to your customers’ needs and feedback.

It’s not that any business looks for ways to dodge their customers or engage in fraudulent ignorance intentionally.

To the contrary, the task of qualitatively handling each and every query to satisfy every user becomes too hectic and redundant; businesses therefore, feel the need to dedicate several resources solely for providing support.

To tackle this, smart business executives choose to invest in innovative management platforms that provide self service portals. As the name suggests, you’re not just handing over the responsibility of catering to a customer’s needs and demands. In fact, you’re also empowering your customers to take the initiative and explore their needs further.

All businesses from retail stores to SaaS giants have streamlined their customer service by offering their customers self-service portals to manage their subscriptions.

In a nutshell, here’s an overview of the benefits you get with customer self service portals:

Cost-Efficiency
Reduced Workload
Customer Empowerment and Ease
Time Saving

However, it’d be unfair to say this is all there is to this innovation. For a better view, let’s dive into the advantages businesses get with self service portals:

Easy Onboarding Process

The first thing in a subscription lifecycle is the onboarding process. Once a visitor on your website turns into a customer, the onboarding process is initiated. This entails providing the customer with the relevant credentials that they’ll need to log in to their subscription management portal.

This portal will greet your customers and get them enrolled as a member or subscriber in your database. With an easy one-time sign up, you’re going to be directing your customers to manage everything from their integrated dashboards.

As established above, customer service is directly linked with a brand’s identity in terms of generating trust and loyalty. Unless you manage to impress your subscribers during the onboarding process, you’re probably going to experience high churn rates down the line.

That is to say, even if you improve the quality of the service you’re providing, if your customer support isn’t up to the expectations of your customers, your subscribers will lean towards your competition.

Interactive All-In-One Interface for Subscription Management

Where once the administrator behind a platform was supposed to respond and address customer requests and queries, customers easily manage their subscriptions as per their convenience.

For example, if a member of your gym wants to sign up for boxing class as well, your self service platform will allow your subscribers to easily upgrade their subscriptions.

For all businesses, this spells out remarkable upselling and cross selling opportunities that are inevitably going to help generate and streamline more revenue.

Similarly, there are times when subscribers aren’t content with the service they’re getting. Perhaps they simply want to pause their subscriptions.

Unlike other management software, they can do so with a subscription management platform that allows you to curate subscription lifecycles and offer such privileges to your subscribers.

This further extends the opportunity for merchants to dictate the terms of cancellations and design custom conditions and fee for resubscriptions.

Seamless Communication

You need to provide an interactive dashboard that provides customers and administrators the chance to interact with one another. Communication is key in establishing a good rapport with your customers and highlighting issues and possible points for improvement.

This means that you need to prioritize customer input. Obviously, not all requests and concerns raised by your customers are going to resonate with your business needs.

However, even if there are some absurd concerns, always make sure to look at things from the customer’s perspective.

The golden rule of businesses is that the customer is always right. And for subscription businesses, the significance of this proverb is highlighted even more. With customer self service portals, you can not only receive feedback but you can also reach out to your subscribers.

It’s crucial that you have a platform that doesn’t dictate the terms and conditions for your outreach. This is especially useful for businesses who’re looking to upsell and cross-sell more services/products.

Unlike social platforms and communication mediums like emails, your own platform will give you an edge in executing marketing strategies.

In fact, if you think you want to run a survey and ask your customers how they came across your business or how they’d rate your features or services, you can do so with subscription management platforms like SubscriptionFlow.

For example, you can pitch customers ideas for upgrades and similar subscriptions to their existing plans. Since you’ll be communicating with an online customer, you can convince them to subscribe to something more.

Real-Time Analytics and Monitoring

The fact that it’s your own platform also means that you’ll be able to monitor everything that happens on it.

This means that you’ll be monitoring whatever your subscribers are doing on their dashboards. You will have access to real-time analytics and will also be able to monitor any changes that are made instantly.

The fact that you’re empowering your customers to make decisions will also mean you get reliable insights. This information, when compiled and analysed, will further help you identify your buyer persona.

How you got your current customers to subscribe, how they interact with different plans and how likely they are to upgrade, downgrade or even churn out are crucial insights that are required by all businesses to set up a lead scoring criterion.

Effective Marketing Strategies with Credible Insights

Lastly, and perhaps one of the most overlooked but crucial advantages of offering a self-service portal is effective marketing. With all of the above features, you’ll be able to narrow down possible customers based on your existing clientele data.

Further analysis will highlight KPIs and insights that will help you identify possible markets to target. You can take metrics such as region information, audience behavior, session times, etc. They will help you revise your marketing strategies.

So, Why Wait?

All of the above proves that incorporating a self service customer portal in your subscription business is integral for businesses. Whether it’s to ensure that you keep your customers or to stay ahead of the competition. Especially if you’re in an industry that has a lot of competitors already offering state of the art customer experience. You’d better get in touch with SubscriptionFlow and get yourself the best subscription management Software in the market!