Bridging the gap between Salesforce & Billing

Editor's Notes

• #3: (Tara) Good afternoon, I’d like to welcome everyone on the call to Bridging the Gap between Salesforce and your billing system. Before we start I’d like to introduce today’s speaker. Donna McPhee is Fusesbill’s customer success manager. She spends her days with our customers, addressing requirements, helping to onboard, and being there for whatever our customers need. In fact, Donna even helps people who aren’t customers with any questions about Fusebill they may have as they are researching our service. Anyone on the call who has ever talked to Donna knows how important it is to her that our customers succeed, not just with Fusebill but with their own business as well. Before starting at Fusebill Donna worked her magic at Premiere Global Services, Phresseia, and like many of us at Fusebill - Protus.
• #4: (Tara)Here’s a look at today’s agenda, as you can see we’re going to start things off be looking at billing the customer experience,
• #5: (Donna)Theremay be some people on the line what aren’t convinced yet that billing is part of the customer experience so we’re going to start there. It’s no surprise to anyone that the way we buy things has changed, remember stopping by the video store on the way home and going through those huge racks of new releases, and then waiting in a long line that isn’t moving because the person at the front can’t find their membership card and can’t remember the phone number they used to sign up?Or leavingyour house to buy wine, underwear, personal hygiene products, healthy snacks, dog treats and pretty much everything else you needed?It stands to reason that if the way we are buying has changed, then the way we are selling has too and businesses are running into some challenges they may not have been expecting.The first challenge is having to deal with the recurring nature of your billing. Suddenly you need to send a bill or charge a credit card 12 times a year instead of once, and with that everything becomes a lot more complicated, more expensive, and more prone to error.  Oh, and if that’s not enough, you discover that many of your old transactional back office systems are also failing because they weren’t designed to support the non-linear flow of ongoing subscription management. And none of your systems are integrated so you’re faced with ton of extra manual work. And then there’s the biggest challenge of all – addressing the reality that the sales process is now only the first part of an ongoing relationship between you and your customers, a relationship that needs to be nurtured and managed throughout their customer lifetime, from renewing their subscription to cross-selling to up-selling different products. A relationship that billing is now a key part of.
• #6: (Donna)We’re going to look at these challenges one at a time. As the title of this slide states: Customer Lifecycle is KeyIf billing is now a part of the customer relationship, it goes without saying it’s part of the customer experience. This slide highlights a bit of the contrast between the traditional one-off sales and on-going subscription sales. In the subscription models we show here, following the initial sale there is a lot of activity and focus that needs to be placed on growing that customer relationship. The fact that they’ve signed up once does not mean that you are able to retain them, sell them other products, or upsell them and make sure they are getting the most value from your product. What becomes clear from this slide is that in the subscription model the initial sale is what activated the customer lifecycle initiating the real business focus of extending and maximizing the customer lifetime by decreasing churn rates and increasing customer revenue. From a more strategic perspective, questions around how to use the data and information generated over the customer lifecycle in order to optimize the business become increasingly important.
• #7: (Donna)But what we come across time and time again is that the focus of almost all of a company’s business systems are ONLY on the initial sale and very little thought is given to what happens to customers after that, and this is particularly true in companies organized around Salesforce.
• #8: (Donna)I’m sure if you think of your own habits you’ll agree that one of the most common interactions that customers have with a subscription service is a billing related issue. And by billing I mean everything from creating an account, ordering, changing it, paying for the account, receiving invoices and things like that, but also managing payment information, credit cards, etc. As we work with customers, we find that up to 40% of inbound calls to a support team are often billing related. And roughly half of customer churn relates to payment related information, which could be credit cards that expire or failure to properly process recurring payments. So centralizing and managing all of the communications from all systems is an important part of customer interaction.
• #9: (Donna)So how do you this?One solution is to truly automate the management of the customer lifecycle, from initiation through to other billing activities until their final end through one service. By doing this you can make sure that all communications have a consistent tone and character and provide a dependable customer experience with no communication points slipping through the cracks. Unfortunately in many businesses billing-related components are Ad Hoc and sources can range from a salesperson, a support agent, billing agent, or marketing. Add automated emails triggered by customer activity (or inactivity) from various systems such as payment processors, ordering systems, etc. and the result can be messy and bad for business.We think (and if you don’t now, we’re hoping by the end of the webinar you’ll agree) that the best service for this job is your billing service. If you’re not currently using a billing service, think about what happens when your client claims, not to have received an email; or has lost the important information contained in the welcome email, or misplaced an invoice? If it’s hard for them to get what they need, or for you to replace this information, it’s going to impact customer experience. By automating a lot of the touch points in the lifecycle, you can better control this experience just by making it seamless and consistent. By doing things like tying the account status to payments, you can go farther and distinguish customers in good standing from delinquent and defaulted accounts, and you can ensure that this status is used by all service delivery systems. Once implemented you can even set up alerts so both you and your customers are notified when an account status changes, whichwill significantly increase efficiencies across accounts. 
• #10: (Tara)That’s pretty quick over view of the importance of billing and some the billing-related activities in the customer experience. We are sending out a paper for to everyone on the call today that goes into more detail and of course this is a favorite subject for our experts so if you have more detailed questions, we can for sure get those answered for you. But now we’re going to look at the benefits of integrating salesforce with a billing service like Fusebill.
• #11: (Donna)Many companies following the subscription model use the three core systems shown on this slide. One is a Sales Force Automation system, that is most often Salesforce.com, the second is a billing system (or for a many businesses who don’t have a billing system this is an accounting system). And the third is the subscription service itself or the the actual delivery mechanism of what’s being sold versus charged.  You’ll notice we’ve also included a block for support and this is because clearly somebody needs to be able to address questions about ordering (where the order is, what the payment status is, what the account status is) etc. For example, a customer may be identified in the service because of a free trial, but because there is no order attached that customer does not enter the billing system. Or a customer maybe in Salesforce but is not removed after failure to pay. These types of scenarios in disconnected services are many and make obvious why there is a need to link and correlate the systems.  Most often the system of record is a billing system; because this is where the money resides, it is the most reliable source of current customer status, there is generally accounting controls around it as well, and it documented auto-logs of when changes occur.
• #12: (Donna) If you’re using Salesforce, or are thinking of moving to salesforce, it is probably your core or “Master” system which means you follow the sales dominant model shown on this slide. We go into detail about the other models in this webinar’s companion paper, but to keep this presentation at a reasonable time we’ll just look at this model. I’ll just note here that this is the most common scenario for B2B businesses. A Sales Dominant core system is the one where all the orders are coming in to sales team and managed in Salesforce.com. For the most part, customers are not signing up by themselves, they talk to a salesperson, the salesperson signs a contract, gets an order, and then from there,populates the other systems. What our customers generally want is for their salespeople to workin Salesforce only and not have to learn any other systems or have to push (point one on this slide) new orders into the billing and thenonce approved by the billing system (for example to make sure the credit cards work) push that order out to the service fulfillment system. This is shown in points 1 and 2 on this slide – info is pushed from Salesforce into billing and then through to the other systems. Point three on this slide deals with the flip side, where the billing system pushes information it has about the customer to salesforce, this could include information like a change in account status, or a customer who is getting close to a renewal date, or if a payment has failed. Basically any and all information required by the salesteam to optimize the customer experience and grow business.  Arrow 3 shows the billing systems pushing status information back into other systems (the service and Salesforce). This would occur for example when the sales temanotifying the sales team that they need to do something, such as turning off the service for a subscriber who is no longer paying example when it comes to the end of a subscription.
• #13: (Tara)Now let’s look at Fusebill’s Salesforce CRM integration application. This application is available for free from the AppExchange and is available for Salesforce Professional edition and higher. As we’re going through these slides you’ll notice screen shots of our integration. While this isn’t a how to session, we wanted to give you an idea of how it works and how we try to make it as painless as possible. We also wanted to say no system or service including Fusebill is perfect for everyone, so if you’re looking for a billing service, please take the time to find the service that is right for your business.
• #14: (Donna)By bridging the gap between your CRM and your billing with the Fusebill Salesforce CRM integration, a large number of the manual processes generated by having to update various systems go away. The information shared from the master to the slaves is correct, upto date and is available for everyone. This solves two of the typical issues we discussed early right away – ad hoc emails and problems caused by different departments having different information on the same customer – go away immediately. As this slide states, the Fusebill Salesforce integration is two-way, meaning if you make changes in one system it updates the other, keeping everything in sync. For example, customer accounts in Fusebill are published to Salesforce and opportunities in Salesforce create billing accounts in Fusebill. It’s generally not sufficient to push information one way or another because you want to be able to push orders into your billing system, and also status changes and renewal notices back into Sales Force. It is much more valuable when there is that tight bi-directional integration.
• #15: (Donna)With our integration you can create accounts, manage subscriptions, and view customer information without leaving Salesforce. No one will have to duplicate information in both services or make manual updates from one to another because the account synchronization means new customers created in Fusebill are automatically sent to Salesforce with Fusebill account fields and subscription data. Information for existing customers such as status, balance, subscription setting and subscription cancellations is also synchronized.
• #16: (Donna)With our 2 way integration application your sales team can manage Fusebill billing accounts without ever having to leave salesforce. This includes creating accounts, managing subscriptions, and viewing customer information. Not only will sales have access to all of the information they need, they don’t even have to go looking for it as it’s all in the system they are already familiar with.
• #17: (Donna)Knowing information like when renewal dates are coming up, and account status, etc. can help sales upsell and cross sell to their customers which grows business, strengthen customer relationships and improve the customer experience. This integration makes it easier for your sales team to not just do their job, but do their job better.
• #18: (Donna)A new customer or sale can often mean the beginning of tedious manual processes that often have to be repeated month after month.Duplicating information can often lead to errors so reducing the amount of data entry will make billing more efficient while reducing errors.By integrating Fusebill and Salesforce these manual processes are greatly reduced, many times eliminated all together.
• #19: (Donna)Operations and legal will love that security concerns also vanish as credit card information is securely captured by Fusebill and stored in PCI Level 1 compliant facilities.Time and resources are saved because IT no longer has to deal with the hassles and risk of compliance, and with an integrated system IT no longer has to define, implement and maintain changes to effected businesses.Using the Fusebill Salesforce integration application, allows you to:Publish your product catalog to Salesforce.Choose what information your sales teamEnsure credit card info is captured securely by FusebillBy integrating Fusebill and Salesforce these manual processes are greatly reduced, many times eliminated all together.
• #20: (Donna)Operations and legal will love that security concerns also vanish as credit card information is securely captured by Fusebill and stored in PCI Level 1 compliant facilities.Time and resources are saved because IT no longer has to deal with the hassles and risk of compliance, and with an integrated system IT no longer has to define, implement and maintain changes to effected businesses.Using the Fusebill Salesforce integration application, allows you to:Publish your product catalog to Salesforce.Choose what information your sales teamEnsure credit card info is captured securely by FusebillBy integrating Fusebill and Salesforce these manual processes are greatly reduced, many times eliminated all together.
• #21: (Donna)Another benefit to your business you’ll see with the Fusebill Salesforce integration is that when you do this type of integration it means that you are generating a tremendous amount of data and valuable information, and that information can be used to drive reports and analytical insights that help you grow your business, help you understand how to keep your customers longer, how to identify customers that are more valuable and programs that are bringing you more valuable customers so that you can put more money into those programs and less into other programs that do not produce the same results. “In simplistic terms, you are looking for signals of cohorts or segments of customers that behave in a certain way. Looking at these drivers and targeting programs to improve your overall business.”
• #22: (Tara)From a functional overview of Fusebill, it acts asan end-to-end subscription management, customer lifecycle management toolfor subscription businesses, that goes from helping to define price plans and products, through to creating and building accounts, sending invoices, collecting payments via credit card or other mechanisms. Fusebill isaccessible online, isPCI Level 1 Compliant, provides access to open APIs and a collection of self-serve tools for agents as well as your own customers or partners. Fusebill’s recurring billing and payments platform manages your recurring billing needs throughout the customer lifecycle – from signup or account creation, through recurring payments and invoices, dunning and customer communication. Fusebill supports your entire organization – from accounting and billing operations, through sales, marketing and management.Fusebill also provides access to a collection of detailed reports and analytics for insights into your business, which provide insight into managing the lifecycle of your customers.With Fusebill’s salesforce integration application, you’ll bridge the power of both billing and CRM which will lead to better processes, better customer communications, and the type of customer relationships which lead to success. Fusebill also provides access to a collection of detailed reports and analytics for insights into your business, which help you manage the lifecycle of your customers.
• #23: (Tara)The market we serve tells us proudly what we are doing. Yes they like the cost savings. Extending customer life cycles, but the majority of our testimonials overwhelming tell us they love the extra mile that we go in terms of support. We always wanted to offer great support but we were thrilled to see that how well we supported and transitioned our customers was at the top of the list! But we do have many value benefits that we can breakdown…
• #25: (DonnaWherever you are in terms of billing your subscription business today, it might be any hosts of simple applications, we encourage you to take a look at where you can go. 100percent automated billing, Intelligence that provides visibility for growth, and an integration with salesforce that allows you to extend and maximize customer lifetime by decreasing churn rates and increasing customer revenue. Its not a daunting task. It’s a well thought out finely tuned migration process designed to get you up and running fast.
• #26: Tara