Business economies have evolved from product-specific sales to keeping the customer at the heart of their operations; they’ve sold products and services, and even moved into the digital space through e-commerce and software-as-a-service.

All these transitions have been a direct result of developing customer attitudes and behaviors, and businesses have had to adapt to these trends in order to stay relevant and competitive. It’s the simple nature of business.

Customer expectations have and will continuously keep growing, and some of the latest trends have been the emergence of different products being packaged and sold to the consumer as a service. For instance, apart from software, businesses have started offering platforms, mobile backend, infrastructure and even products as a service.

The changing face of customer service
Considering the presence of innovative way of value delivery, it’s no surprise that Support for these activities has also changed radically.

Most of these offerings occur on the basis of a subscription – ranging from weekly, monthly, annually or any custom time period. This means that sales and support managers have had to modify their KPIs in order to ensure that they are retaining the maximum amount of customers.

With a shift from one-time sales to ongoing customer subscriptions, businesses need to start thinking further into the future, and how they can achieve higher retention rates most effectively.

And the biggest factor is customer satisfaction, which isn’t really a new metric but it’s even more important in the current business dynamics.

Focusing on smarter customer analytics
Business operations are now more concentrated on acquiring potential customers and building long-term relationships with them by keeping them happy. Improving success rates and maximizing service renewals are becoming increasingly important than simply measuring on-boarding efforts and the number of footfalls.

The higher the customer satisfaction levels, the more likely your customers are to stick with you through the more uncertain business times.

Having instant feedback on various parameters such as receivables, inventory and process utilization, ticketing efficiency, service analytics and revenue sources can help your business maintain a foothold in a dynamically changing environment.

At the base of it, bringing the most out of your services is no longer based on how your sales funnel is flowing, but rather how your customers feel about your activities and what are the chances of them coming back to your new products and services, or products-as-a-service.

Recognizing a necessary shift to new-age tools
Most conventional CRM and ERP solutions were made before XaaS was conceptualized, which has resulted in outdated or severely lacking tools for effectively managing customer relationships. Adding to the issue, a good percentage of companies currently use a crude mix-match of applications, analytics and support solutions.

This traditional mix of software in a single platform ran the risk of producing duplicates and inaccuracy in customer profiles and sales records, and reducing the chance of obtaining valuable insights into the customers through unnecessary complexities.

The best answer to this situation is to have a centralized software solution that is optimized to manage customer subscriptions by keeping track of all service sales, payments and collections, and making them accessible through a single dashboard.

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