Building relationships and trust online can be difficult and the ongoing relationship can be fragile. The more online interactions the greater the opportunity to increase trust through positive experiences, but the dark side of that opportunity is the risk of exposure to poor interactions and the damage they can do to trust. Subscription based products and services, which are more prevalent now than ever before in a wide variety of industries, are particularly exposed to experience risks since long term company success is tied to renewals and relationships. Customer service (and customer success) takes on significantly increased importance to those experiences and the health of the customer relationships.

Yesterday subscription management provider Zuora announced that it plans to acquire Zephr, a provider of a subscription experience platform. The London based Zephr, which focuses on the digital publishing and media industry vertical, already integrates with the Zuora application suite “out of the box” with several joint customers in production. In general the two sets of applications are complimentary with little overlap. The overall subscriber experience is business critical in both new customer acquisition and long term customer retention, so it’s easy to see the opportunity for the combined solution.

In the recently published report on subscriber experience, we examined a number of topics including the factors that are important in making a subscription purchase decision. The report is based on a survey conducted in May of 2022 (N=394) and focused on business to business (B2B) subscriptions. There were two questions related to the selection and purchase, one looked at influence on the purchase decision and the other at selection of the service provider.

We recently published a report on subscriber experience based on a survey conducted in May of 2022 (N=394). The survey collected data on a number of subscription topics, including trying to understand why customers upgrade from a free version. Free versions and free trials are important tools in building a product led growth (PLG) business and conversion to paid is always a hot topic in a PLG company. There are many factors that can influence the customer’s decision to convert, but there is a core set of levers that can be manipulated.

There’s a process in incident management called “swarming” that has emerged over the past couple of years. The idea seems pretty simple (and maybe just puts a name on something that companies have done in some fashion for a longer time), when there is a critical incident, bring a team together that has the capabilities and skills to find and execute the resolution. This approach eliminates handoffs and puts the spotlight on the issue and the “right” team to sort it out. While the idea is pretty simple, executing it effectively has some complexities and impediments created by the lack of a systematic way to manage the swarming. The process also eliminates the need for the escalation or tiered model in your support organization, creating instead a collaborative support model.