Few platforms can compete with Zuora for enterprise-level businesses looking to launch and manage a subscription service. Features like Zuora Billing and Zuora Revenue make it simple for businesses to run subscription-based products at scale.
Using Zuora alongside a CRM platform like Salesforce allows to manage their subscription service businesses while enabling agents to help customers. While using the two platforms side by side may be good enough, combining the two unlocks the real magic. Here’s how it helps elevate the subscription experience.
7 reasons you should integrate Zuora and Salesforce
Integrating Zuora and Salesforce offers a higher level of functionality that allows you to manage your subscription-based platform easily. Let’s look at some of the best reasons to connect the platforms and see how they can help you elevate the user experience.
Creates a more personalised customer experience
McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. That number is likely to have risen in the past few years as personalised experiences are no longer just ‘nice-to-have’ but have moved into the realm of necessity.
With such a highly contested marketplace, businesses cannot afford to fall behind on their personalisation efforts. For subscription businesses, every month presents an opportunity for a customer to cancel and move to a competitor. That’s why you must keep people engaged and satisfied that your subscription meets their needs.
Combining Zuora with Salesforce allows businesses to offer a more personalised customer experience. It offers the ability to collect a wide range of subscription insights and surface them all in one place in Salesforce, allowing you to create highly personalised and relevant messaging for your customers.
Combines contact and account data
Providing high-quality customer support requires all the data you need in one place. Flipping between multiple platforms simply adds time and confusion when your customer needs a fast, effective solution. Especially if there are calling in to cancel.
Integrating Zuora and Salesforce allows you to see all your key user data in one place. This also allows you to combine sales and existing subscriber data, allowing you to offer top-quality customer support to everyone — new and existing customers. Sometimes that extra insight into usage or previous issues can open opportunities to turn a cancellation call into an upsell opportunity.
Easily see account payment status
Subscription customers can often run into payment status issues. Their card on file might expire, or they might miss a payment without realising it. This often leads to a message to customer support about why they’ve lost access to their subscription.
Combining your CRM with Zoura means you can instantly see if their issue is related to payment or not, letting you quickly get to the root of their problem, update the payment method in a compliant and secure way, and restore confidence to the subscriber.
Give sales teams insight into your products, pricing, and more
Product information, pricing, and other key information are often stored exclusively in your billing system. This causes problems for your sales team, who need that information to bring in new revenues. Sales will also be the customer’s first port of call for updates on their order status, which is crucial if you’re offering other products alongside your subscription service.
Combining Salesforce and Zuora means your sales team has instant access to all the information they need to sell your subscription products in one place. This lets them upsell and cross-sell more effectively.
Gives you insight into the big picture
Sometimes, it helps to step back and look at how things are going as a whole. Focusing on metrics like conversion rate and renewals is essential, but you need to be sure the overall product performs as it should and that subscribers are happy.
Keeping Salesforce and Zuora separate creates data silos that stop you from seeing the bigger picture. Bringing the two platforms together allows you to see all your insights in one place. This enables you to see how your subscription-based product is doing as a whole and allows you to better understand your current business and prospects.
Improve budgeting and forecasting
Having all your data in one place means you can easily see how your product performs financially. You can use this data to measure historical success and see product growth, which is extremely helpful for launch periods. You can deep-dive in specific offers, promotions, campaigns, and see what was effective and what wasn’t.
Combining Salesforce and Zuora allows your marketing team to see what strategies are most effective, online and offline. Teams can gain insights into how their strategy performs much faster with an integrated system. This will enable them to build future strategies around what works and avoid what doesn’t.
After a couple of months, you can use this combined data to influence your budgeting decisions since you’ll have a solid idea of how the product will perform. The more data you have in one place, the easier and more accurate you can make your forecasting. This helps you plan for the future while closely monitoring current performance.
Improves cross-departmental communication
Being able to access all data in one place makes communication across departments much easier. With siloed software, your sales teams won’t have the same information as the product or marketing or finance team, making it much more difficult to share information.
Combining Zuora and Salesforce removes any roadblocks to communication, ensuring your teams can work together seamlessly to improve the subscriber experience, from resolving a refund issue, to checking the latest retention number, to accelerating the time-to-market of a new subscription campaign.
Learn more about Zuora integration with Salesforce
In such a highly competitive landscape, businesses need to take advantage of anything that will improve their day-to-day operations. Combining Zuora with Salesforce for your subscription business is essential if you want to offer high-quality subscriber experiences and uncover crucial insights on product performance.
Now you know the benefits, check out our guide detailing how to connect Zuora and Salesforce. Our guide also includes more information on each platform for those unfamiliar with all they have to offer.
For more help managing or launching your subscription-based product, or if you just need more information on how subscription commerce can benefit your business, get in touch with the Limio team. We bring Subscription Commerce integrated with Zuora inside Salesforce, making it easy for your agents to sell, retain and help your subscribers. We’d love to hear from you.