Subscription Engineer#4: You are as good as your back office

Happy Wednesday!

Let’s face it, no matter how good your product is, your customer won’t like you if you don't send packages in time, send wrong items or your customer support team is not responding to the requests. So your subscription is as good as your backoffice. And in order for your backoffice to be efficient you need to have a good CRM and WMS. So today we are going to talk about the CRM system.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and there are a lot of things that fall into categories (like Hubspot for the sales team) but in the context of physical subscription it is a system that allows to manage customer and customer's requests. There are several options for the CRM:

• It's a part of the the e-commerce stack (think of Shopify)
• 3rd party solution, like Kustomer
• Home grown system if your subscription front store is also homegrown

No matter what route you will choose, these are the features that you should have in your CRM. First of all, you need pretty good search because in practice in many cases it feel like your are trying to solve a murdered and the only thing you have is someone's footprint. So, this is what customers could provide for you:

• First name and the last name, you are lucky if they used them as is
• Email, but there is a big chance that they used a different one for subscription
• Bin + last 4 of the card, but if they used PayPal or AmazonPay it won't help
• Tracking number, that's the one that works in most of the cases unless there was relabeling by the carrier
• Screenshot of the charge amount and date from the bank application. By the way, it could be a charge from 2 years ago.

Once you found the customer it's getting easier but you still might consider to be able to do next things:

• During refund ask for the refund reason so you can always run analytics if refund rate goes up
• Limit refund amount for the regular CX agent and require supervisor approve for the higher ticket
• During cancellation ask for the refund reason so you can always run analytics if refund rate goes up
• Integration with the ESP (email service provider) or at least log of emails/texts that you sent to this customer
• If you run A/B tests - CX should know what experiments customer saw
• Audit log - who and what performed in the CRM

Obviously that goes on top of the operations around ability to fully manage subscription, e-commerce orders if you have them, edit and remove billing and shipping data, adjust subscription box and so on.

I also state it as obvious but you should have a ticketing system like Zendesk to handle all your incoming emails so it's all under control, could be analyzed and properly managed and escalated.

Once you have Zendesk and a working CRM you can do more advanced stuff. Here is a couple of examples.

First, you can do anomaly detection. For example, you can use Machine Learning Algorithms that analyze tickets and if there is a common topic - it categorizes this topic so you will know before the CX team that you might have issues with payments or access in certain regions. Here is an example.

Another popular thing is AI automation. We work with two amazing companies Solvvy and Digital Genius. First one is a website chat widget that can guide customers to the specific article in the FAQ or, if there is a deeper integration, respond to more complicated queries like "Where is my order" and "Please cancel my subscription". Second one integrated with Zedndesk and your website API to do pretty much the same - answer the typical questions and requests. By using these two systems our CX team was able to automate 60% requests and shorten response time to under 10 min. This is best in class.

This is it for today and in the next post we will talk about Warehouse Management Systems and the question you should ask yourself: Why do I care if I use a 3PL provider?

Have a great day!