Chapter 8 Best Practices

Must-Have Capabilities

Honeycomb forming components of customer experience, channel management, and automated workflow together around AppDirect

Every Company’s Set of Essential Requirements Will be Different

As your company readies its plans to move to subscription commerce, you might be thinking that the new billing model you’ll need to implement is the most obvious difference between traditional, one-off transactions and a recurring revenue business model.

While billing is often the first operational change that companies consider, it’s by far not the only difference, nor the most important capability for which your company needs to plan as it adopts a recurring revenue model. That’s because subscription commerce is complex—involving multiple people and products across multiple channels and devices.

Successful subscription commerce requires a technology platform to manage the end-to-end customer journey.

The platform should provide robust capabilities to power a seamless experience for customers, partners, and internal staff across sales, marketing, product delivery and deployment, vendor management, customer support, lifecycle management, and other processes.

Given the breadth of capabilities involved, how do you know which ones are most important for your company? While every situation is different, this guide can help you understand which areas of capabilities will be important and why as you begin your subscription commerce journey.

This chapter covers:

Understand which capabilities are critical to a successful subscription commerce strategy in these key areas:

  • Customer experience management
  • Channel management
  • Workflow automation
  • Launch, scale, and ongoing optimization

Common Denominators

Depending on your industry and where your company is on its subscription commerce journey, the use cases for a subscription commerce platform can vary, but commonly include:

  • Launching a referral marketplace
  • Selling or scaling subscription services
  • Automating reseller management
  • Launching and/or monetizing a digital ecosystem
  • Selling and managing services on connected devices

Your business may start with one use case and expand to others over time as you see incremental success. Alternatively, you may decide to minimally meet requirements for multiple use cases right from the first launch and then expand capabilities within each one over time.

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Definitive Guide to Subscription Commerce

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