Skip to main content
Blog

What a CEO Cares Most About in a Subscription Management System

By August 6, 2019February 4th, 2021No Comments

Ubersmith - What a CEO Cares About in a Subscription SystemOur marketing team asked me to share some thoughts to be used for writing this blog post, but I thought I’d go ahead and write the post myself since it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time living and breathing as head of Ubersmith for nearly five years now. I’ve actively used our own subscription billing and business management system while working with and supporting countless CEOs of our customers globally, so I am hopefully qualified enough to address the topic.

First, I want our team to have the tools, info and integrations they need to succeed as a team and as individuals in supporting our customers and doing their work. Second, I want our customers to be able to use our version of the system to quickly and easily pay their bill, create a support ticket, view a device, customize what they see and more via our portal.

In general, I want our system to be accurate, up to date, fast, intuitive, secure, scalable, integrated and capable.

As CEO, I actually look at our system at least a few times per day, on average. One of the most common reasons I do this is to search for a customer or prospect that I may be supporting or that comes up in a leadership team meeting. With our billing system, I can easily see key customer information, billing, pricing, tickets, custom notes and more. As a result, I’m more informed to better help with whatever issue is being discussed or addressed.

Another reason I’m using our system is to view reports. Some of my favorite ones include: viewing MRR (for new and existing customers, expansion vs. contraction vs churn and which customers are driving shifts), current and past customers (including accurate counts of them, contact info, usage, history, growth, payment status and more), our top customer list, sent invoices, payments received by type, support department statistics, staff performance and more.

Regarding support, I often view our open and on hold support tickets for billing and related topics as CEO while seeing the types of issues we are seeing to potentially notice any patterns or hot issues to address from a billing, pricing, support, development or company-wide perspective. I also like to view tickets for other areas like tech support, ops and sales as they are integrated into our overall system, including external and internal tickets.

Tied in with our subscription billing system is a sales quoting and contracts system for our sales professionals, including our sales managers. In this area, I appreciate being able to look up and review sales leads, opportunities and quotes for our largest customers and our newest customers, for example, to help the team when needed with any complex situations, requests, renewals, add-ons, downgrades, churn avoidance and other customer or prospect issues.

While I don’t look at it often, I appreciate being able to look at our order management system which our operations and support team relies on for automating onboarding, training, support and upgrade activities. In addition, I appreciate seeing the status of our company’s infrastructure (e.g. sites, apps, tools, devices, etc.) in our device management part of our overall subscription business management system, all in a single convenient and secure interface.

Thanks for reading this post about what I care most about in a subscription system as CEO. I hope you found it useful to walk through with me, and I would love to hear your thoughts and questions in the comments below.

Leave a Reply