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Managing superior customer relationships is no longer a choice but has become a necessity in today’s era. This is easier said than done as businesses are engaged in multiple activities including but not limited to managing multiple business processes. Salesforce – a robust cloud-based CRM has become one of the most popular and widely adopted CRM platforms across the globe. The innovative platform is endowed with multiple features, functionalities, and components that can be leveraged by businesses to resolve their business issues.

What is a subscription-based business model? Subscription business models are those where customers pay recurringly for continuous access to a product or service. Subscription business models can accelerate growth by virtue of creating recurring revenue. This means as a business owner you get revenue again and again over predictable intervals such as monthly or annually as and when your customers renew their subscriptions. What are the benefits of subscription-based business models? Subscription business models protect you during circumstances created by economic uncertainties. They create a stream of predictable revenue from a stable base of returning customers allowing you to plan for longer into the future. Here is some further detailing of the benefits. Fast Tracked revenue. As your business attracts more customers, recurring revenue from subscriptions grow exponentially. It’s always more convenient to manage existing customer than to attract and retain new ones. Subscription results in better retention drives revenue growth more efficiently and easily. Predictable revenue. You don’t need to plan quarter to quarter. Businesses who offer subscriptions, more often than not, start each quarter with a predictable expected revenue closer to the preceding quarter and then build on top of that. Business agility. Once you establish long-term relationships with your customers, you get access to valuable continuous data that will help you to get a better understanding of your customers, and consequently empower you to server them better as you go. Armed with aggregated customer data of their past interactions with you, you can learn about them faster and respond with new appropriate offerings. And the more this happens, the more efficient and unique your offerings will become. What are the different kinds of subscription business models? There are several kinds of subscription business models, but essentially, they all mean the same thing which is, you charge for access to products instead of charging for the products themselves. Here’s a look at three of the most popular ones: Subscription model: Revenue is set for each subscription cycle which could be weekly, monthly or annual. The charges payable are predetermined and based on a fixed date cycle. For example: a fixed monthly subscription fee for a music or video service. Consumption model: In this case, revenue is variable. The amount that is chargeable and when it is due is based on usage. For example, a cab service. Hybrid model: In this model, customers are offered a mix of subscription and usage. In this case revenue has both fixed as well as variable components. For example: over usage data fees on your internet usage on top of a fixed monthly service fee for a fixed data usage cap. How can I implement a subscription-based model for my business? To implement a subscription model, you need to adopt tools and processes that allow you to create a consistent buying journey, while knowing that customers move through different channels and make modifications to their subscriptions with each of them over time. Once you create a consistent journey, track new metrics to ensure you are on the right path. Here’s how you can get there: 1. Empower customers to subscribe and pay over any channel With a subscription-based revenue model, you are constantly interacting with your customers, and they are not always available for a conversation. And in today’s pandemic reality, they increasingly want to engage on their own term. In fact, recent research suggests that they now prefer digital self-service and remote customer service rather than face-to-face interactions. Businesses need to make it possible for customers to renew and/or upgrade their subscriptions and pay instantly on the channels of their choice. This could translate to having a website or a mobile app, to enable that service. It’s a known fact in today’s digital business context, customers don’t just want to choose digital channels for interaction. They want to be able to cross them.   As a business, you want to know how you can deliver a seamless and consistent journey across channels. For instance, a customer might initiate a purchase on your online store, but then being routed to a sales rep when they stall or hesitate at checkout. A good subscription management mechanism can help. It combines customer relationship management tools, and along with the power of self-service, provides access to the same data to all teams. Once they have that, they can pick up customer conversations from where they left off. As a business, you want every touchpoint with the customer to be amazing. And in order to deliver an exceptional journey, you need to integrate all customer data for a compete view of your customer. Subscription management provides a mechanism way to connect customer data that delivers a seamless journey and provides a great customer experience at every touchpoint. 2. Deliver value to customers Subscriptions don’t mean much if they are delivering value to your customers at every step. You’re consistently asking them to renew and pay for their subscriptions. IF there is no value in the offering, customer won’t renew their subscriptions. Consequently, they’ll fall through the cracks and your growth will hit a roadblock. There needs to be a paradigm shift in your thinking from delivering products to delivering value. How can you consistently deliver value-as-a-service to your customers? For instance, Spotify doesn’t sell music. They offer entertainment-as-a-service. Likewise, an e-retailer doesn’t just deliver great products. They deliver an exceptional buying and customer service experience-as-a-service. Value is unlocked as customer’s access and use the product. This brings customer service teams into focus, who will need to ensure sure adoption and customer satisfaction is high to the point of being delightful. A customer relationship management system that provides complete visibility of data and a certain level of automation is vital. Visibility helps you keep an eye on and act on adoption and usage patterns. And you can jump is to support and assist a customer to fix an issue early before it becomes a nuisance. For instance, with automation you can make it easy and fast for customers to start using new products or services they’ve purchased. 3. Understand recurring revenue with new metrics Customer acquisition is a thing of the past. It doesn’t hold the key anymore. Customer value, which leads to customer retention, which eventually drives recurring revenue, are the key metrics now. How will you improve customer retention without measuring it? Let us first look at customer value metrics. You can measure customer value by tracking exactly how much your customers are using your subscription offering. One of the key metrics is to track is average revenue per user, which is as simple as it sounds. Gross revenue divided by number of users. As your business evolves, with more processes and automation in place, you will become more and more effective at targeting customers with the appropriate offerings, all while retaining them and getting them to renew their subscriptions. And once that happens you will see an improvement in the average revenue per customer. To measure growth in top-line revenue, you need to monitor monthly and annual recurring revenue. These are significant since increasing them translates to your revenue streams becoming more and more predictable and that allows you to plan ahead. Ready to open new paths to revenue growth? A subscription-based business model is today’s new reality of a digital-first approach for business. However, it can only succeed if its authentic. Customers are smart. And you can’t fake value to them.  They will renew only when they get real, consistent value for their money. It’s both a challenge and an opportunity to get close to your customers, not just know them better but understand them better, and offer what they want in the way they want it. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Consulting Partner and can help you to re-imagine your offerings and envision a whole new customer journey. Contact us today to learn how a subscription-based revenue model can deliver value to your customers and drive revenue and agility for your business.

Customers are always connected. They are always adapting to the latest technology, quickly. The Salesforce platform is a set of unified platform services that easily adapts to your ever-changing business needs. Powering and connecting all your business processes to unify the customer experience. So, sales can sell smarter and faster the way they want landing their next big customer from anywhere. Service can then tailor their process quickly creating aps specific to the customer needs like setting up custom intelligent alerts to help find smart solutions even before they know there is an issue. Which keeps the customer happy. Marketing can take them of personalised journeys recommending helpful products along the way and IT can integrate third party apps and IoT device data quickly adapting to the latest advancements to better advance the customer relationship. A trusted secure platform that lets you tailor any app or process for anyone in any department using low code solutions with lightning that are instantly mobile. Increasing productivity for employees and connectivity with customers and you are easily able to innovate, building more complex apps with intelligence working with emerging intelligent technologies like Artificial Intelligence making you more intelligent about your customers. You can even plug in thousands of pre-built apps and components from the Salesforce AppExchange and empower everyone from serious coders to the not serious ones. With help of thousands of developers and administrators through trailhead on the worlds No1 enterprise platform letting you easily innovate around each and every customer. Create, automate, deploy and secure apps with the world’s leading low code platform. Build scalable apps without any code development tools. Connect your employees, processes, and systems seamlessly to automate workflows and deliver a personalised customer experience, all with best in class security and governance practices. No need to code any more. Fast track work with clicks to build integrated flows in Slack, your digital HQ. Have them execute complex processes on the Salesforce Platform. Deliver experiences. Drive productivity. Automate processes, build smarter, robust apps, and secure data across the customer lifecycle. Improve efficiency and trim IT spends with the Salesforce Platform. Automate easily. Automate tasks with low-code tools and seamlessly connect your entire organisation. Build apps. Build and test apps easily with the latest tools in change and release management. Scale securely. Safeguard your data and conform to compliances with an enterprise grade security and privacy framework. CLICK TO BUILD Go to market fast with powerful tools to build apps and workflows. Build and deliver intelligent, engaging customer experiences that respond to changing business with clicks not code. Use the power of AI to deliver insights from apps that are connected to your Salesforce data. Drive actions such as intelligent recommendations to enhance growth and productivity with AI-powered automation. What is a Low Code approach? It's a modern approach to building apps and software that necessitates little to no coding. It’s more than a buzzword. It's coding re-imagined. It’s an alternative approach to orthodox software development that is visual. With a low-code development platform, teams can use intuitive graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and use “drag and drop” and “point and click” functionality to customize software. Since one doesn’t need specialised coding skills, business users can utilise drag and drop functionality to assist programmers to create custom apps and workflows for customers, partners and employees. By bringing app development closer to business users, low code plugs the gap between business and IT. Sales, service and marketing teams can play a more involved role in software development. Consequently, IT teams have more bandwidth at hand for more pressing technical tasks. The spread of app development from tech to business can lay the foundation for a digital transformation across the enterprise. SHIP WITH CONFIDENCE Build on a trusted platform with in-built security and performance. Deliver engaging digital experiences with intrinsic security and trust. The Salesforce Platform lets you seamlessly integrate disconnected systems and data siloes with API-driven services and event-based interactions. Deploy apps faster with simplified open technologies on a fully managed scalable platform. Here are the platform services that come with Salesforce Mobile   Make every app mobile friendly.   Blockchain   Build trusted partnerships.   Artificial Intelligence (AI)   Personalise every experience.   Vision   Visualise your business with AI.   Voice   Deliver a conversational experience.   Security   Deliver trust across every touchpoint.   Privacy & Identity   Manage customer and consent.   Community   Bring your customers closer.   Builder   Build and innovate faster than ever.   Flow   Automate every experience. EMPOWER EVERYONE Empower your entire enterprise to respond to change and upgrade skills on the go. Enable teams to create engaging digital experiences in a code-less framework using customisable components and services. Nurture collaboration across any device with a unified model and tools that work better together. And empower team members to upgrade their skills to drive the growth of your business. What exactly is Low Code? It's a modern approach to app development that necessitates little to no coding. Low code is not just buzzword. It's an alternative approach to orthodox app development that is more visual than manual. With a low-code development framework, teams can utilise easy to use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) such as drag and drop functionality to customize apps. Since you don’t need specialised technical or coding knowledge any more, business users easily assist coding teams to create custom apps and workflows for your customers, partners and employees. By bringing app development to business users, the low code approach reduces the gap between IT and business teams. Sales, service, and marketing teams can play a more involved role in app development. This allows IT teams more bandwidth to prioritise pressing technical tasks. The evolution of app development from IT to business can lay the foundation for a digital transformation across the enterprise. TURBO CHARGE SCALE AND INNOVATION WITH HYPER FORCE Grow your business on a trusted, scalable, robust platform. Hyperforce is the next-generation infrastructure architecture of Salesforce. delivers Salesforce products and services reliably and securely on all major public clouds allowing you to augment your customers’ success by rapidly scaling your drag-and-drop driven low code apps to new markets. HYPERCOMPLIANT Store data in one place while staying globally compliant. Enjoy the flexibility of the location of your data to comply with local regulations even in the public sector. HYPERSCALABLE Implement faster with an infrastructure with limitless flexibility. Scale your infrastructure easily. Hyperforce allows resources to be deployed quickly while you have the flexibility of system elasticity. HYPERSECURE Safeguard sensitive data with built-in trust. Hyperforce allows you to prioritise customer data security with the built-in trust that is the cornerstone of the world’s most trusted cloud platform. It works behind the curtain to ensure the security and privacy of your data, so you have the necessary bandwidth to focus on innovation. HYPERCOMPATIBLE Build future-ready apps with backward compatibility. All existing Salesforce apps, customisations, and integrations (whether they are on the cloud or not) will run without disruption on Hyperforce. Summary Salesforce is the world’s leading Enterprise App Development Platform that streamlines your business reach and functionality. You do not need to deal with developers any more to create apps with the Salesforce Platform. With the simplicity of drag-and-drop functionality, just about anyone can build and deploy apps that automate processes that augment the customer experience. And for coders, the Salesforce Platform is language agnostic, which means you can build customs apps using any language. The apps you build can be deployed on any device or on the web, whether simple or complex, and integrate with almost any data source. With Salesforce, you can find new ways to enrich the customer experiences and streamline business processes. Your imagination is perhaps the only thing that may limit you. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Consulting Partner and can help you start building apps in a code less framework. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Development Partner and can help you start building apps in a code-less framework. Contact us today learn how you can get started now.

At the peak of COVID-19, merchants were making decisions in haste to provide the products and services that customers needed. Today, when the world is far more at ease, these makeshift solutions are now intensifying as shoppers have a plethora of options driving expectations to an all new high. Additionally, their patience is very limited now. In fact, research data across over 2000 retailers suggests that 80% of shoppers are very likely to abandon them after three bad experiences. Merchants need deeper the insights into customer behaviour to scale up their business. Here are top 4 trends that have been observed across the world on how the retail landscape is changing. Trend 1: Shopping journeys get more complex During the 2 years of COVID, three types of digital channels grew their transaction share by almost 40%: brand websites, retailer websites and apps, and online marketplaces. This of course includes transactions through their apps as well. In the process, associated channels like delivery apps, social media, and messaging platforms have also become prominent players in the digital commerce eco system, with a growth of over 20%. As the range of shopping channels continues to expand, shopping journeys have got more and more complex. The purchasing journey has become fragmented and complex. It is imperative for brands and merchants to develop a one-on-one relationship with customers across platforms namely social media, messaging platforms, and video to stay relevant. Social media, influencers, and messaging apps have become hugely popular today for product discovery. For making a purchase, social media, digital wallets and email are the leading digital destinations. And when buyers need customer support, they mostly turn to chatbots and social media. Trend 2: The store goes digital Although transactions through brick-and-mortar stores decreased significantly during the pandemic, the physical store still plays an important role in the shopping journey. In fact, reports indicate that over 80% of the global merchandise sales happened at physical stores in 2020. The primary reasons shoppers prefer to visit a physical store are firstly, to touch and feel the product, secondly one gets immediate delivery of the merchandise and finally to avoid logistics costs. However, shoppers today are blurring the lines between digital and physical channels while they are in the store. Many shoppers today research about a product on the retailer’s app while still being in the sore before making a purchase. To compliment this trend, brands and retailers are connecting the in-store experience with an increasing number of digital touchpoints. The role of the store associate is growing as well. At the peak of COVID, store associates evolved from the routine scanning and bagging to becoming customer service reps, product recommenders, and brand influencers. And these roles are more than likely to stay, which makes the role of the store associate in the customer journey far more intriguing. Trend 3: The loyalty game has gone a few notches up Loyalty programs are continuously evolving based on shopper expectations. Although a points-based loyalty program is still the most preferred method today, data indicates that younger generations are seeking a more experience-based journey that establishes a deeper connection with the brand. Millennials today value exclusive access to limited products and richer experiences far more than ever when it comes to loyalty programs. Shoppers are also seeking rewards for their transactions. They are willing to take a further step such as downloading an app or writing an online review and sharing personal information like their birthday or phone number for a more personalized experience and loyalty benefits. Trend 4: Brands and Retailers and brands fast track unified shopping experiences Most customers expect brands and retailers to recognise their unique needs and expectations, but only a portion of them have the capability to turn data into personalized offerings in real time across channels and touchpoints. To address this customer expectation, and to address the challenges associated with delivering that expectation, retailers and brands are adopting a threefold approach: HIRING MORE DATA SCIENTISTS Retailers are actively working to hire more data scientists. And this trend is expected to grow further into 2023. This trend that brands and retailers have the opportunity to overhaul their loyalty programs to meet the rising customer expectations and their openness to share personal data. ADOPTING A UNIFIED ENGAGEMENT PLATFORM Many retailers and brands today are already in the planning stage for such a platform, which allows them to access and monetise customer data by engaging with them at a deeper level. UPGRADING POINT-OF-SALE TECHNOLOGY Going forward, the pint of sale (POS) will become a critical part of a unified customer engagement platform. In fact, new retailers are already adopting this approach and are moving to a cloud solution. The in-store digital experience is key for engaging with customers and driving sales. Here are some tips on now to enhance customer experience. Empower associates with the tools that drive sales As we mentioned before, store associates are adopting extended functional roles such as customer service, ecommerce, and social media experts to engage with shoppers. To be able to wear multiple hats successfully, store associates need access to customer data along with user friendly digital tools. This is where a CRM platform like Salesforce comes into play. Associates can access complete customer profile with information on purchase history, buying preferences, demographic data, customer satisfaction score, and more. To get associates up to speed quickly, Salesforce provides digital learning platforms like myTrailhead that bring associates up to speed on how to handle every aspect of digital and physical transactions. Brands and retailers can reskill associates for routine store tasks such as picking, sorting, packing, and shipping to support the fulfilment journey. Store managers can learn to use digital tools to analyze data, access insights and act on them faster than ever. Maintain real time inventory levels The greatest enemy of customer satisfaction is out-of-stock inventory.  Most shoppers are interested in pre-ordering new or out-of-stock items. This is especially true for fast moving items. Stores can manage inventory levels with a flexible and robust order management system. The order management system connects data across your warehouses and stores to give associates the most accurate status of current inventory. That translates to happy customers. Offer multiple digital payment options Customers need more payment options, period. Having just a credit card machine won’t do. In the era of digital, stores need payment types that are minimally invasive and streamline checkout for customers. Level up store fulfilment During the peak of the pandemic, there was a scramble to buy online or pick up in store. In fact, some retailers even turned some of their stores to micro-fulfilment centers. Make sure to: Clearly communicate important details to customers, such as where to pick up their items from and when. Clearly communicate to customers what identification they need to provide to pick up their orders  Establish a seamless connect with customer service channels so that shoppers can easily chat with an agent to resolve any issues Offer personalized product recommendations to customers based on their purchase Augment customer service across channels with a personal touch Customers love the physical experience, personal touch and immediacy that is intrinsic to in-store shopping. It will be wise extend that experience to your customer service channels. And one of the best ways to achieve this is to train associates by having them help out customer service agents during peak season. Another important consideration is to encourage self-service for customers. Keep your help centre up to date for customers to find their way around. Integrate workflows that guide customers through tasks like how to initiate a return to a nearby store. Use AI-powered chatbots to scale support during sales or holiday seasons. Lastly, adopt asynchronous modes of communication like messaging apps. They keep the conversation going and provide a history of past interactions. Train associates and empower them to resolve customer issues over digital channels and incorporate customer feedback to evolve the experience. Develop a loyal customer base, especially in the era of vibrant social media. Girikon is a Gold Certified Salesforce Consultant and can help you set up a strategy to connect with your customers like never before. Questions? We’ll guide you to the right path CONTACT AN EXPERT