120 V I EWPO I NT Why subscription billing needs to be on CRM How businesses can enhance customer engagement and scale a reliable revenue stream with subscription models built on their customer relationship management platforms Recurring revenue creates long-term enterprise value and after the Covid-19 pandemic, companies in various industries are accelerating the transition of their service offerings to subscription models. Subscription-based, recurring revenue creates a reliable revenue stream that can be sustained in any economic environment. By adopting an integrated billing solution with a customer relationship management (CRM) system, organisations can scale their recurring revenue whilst unlocking new opportunities and maximising profits. Businesses are likelier to achieve the benefits of a subscription model if they keep the customer data in one consolidated application and the customer at the centre of everything they do. Profitability with subscription revenue is achieved by adding new customers and acquiring organic growth in existing accounts. Having customer data in disparate systems creates inefficiencies, so businesses should implement a system that incorporates a holistic relationship with a customer as a foundation for growth in recurring revenue management. Subscription management applications like Work 365, with integration into Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, allows organisations to grow subscription services while automating the billing for these subscriptions. A CRM-integrated subscription management system helps organisations to create multiple sales channels that process quotes and sales orders, partner and reseller channels, customer selfservice or ecommerce applications that bring all customer orders back into one centralised order processing system. Customer subscriptions can be surfaced through self-service portals in CRM and having visibility into customer success, sales and billing teams for customer changes improves efficiencies. Accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are great at financial reporting and accounting functions, but for companies with more than one international region, there is likely to be multiple versions of an accounting system or application. However, one global Dynamics CRM system can be set up to handle customer data and billing with Work 365 across multiple countries, languages and regional settings. This provides a holistic view of one centralised product catalogue, customer data for sales and billing, along with visibility into services across the entire organisation. Utilising Dynamics CRM and Work 365 simplifies a complex ERP roll-out specially to support recurring and subscription-based revenue models. Dynamics CRM implementation partners are seeing customers transitioning their businesses to recurring revenue models while having to present a solution that simplifies various channels, with a recurring billing solution and a lower cost of implementation across different verticals. Customers have a large amount of control in how they consume subscription services and deploying a solution like Dynamics CRM with Work 365 creates long-term, sustainable benefits for subscription-based business models. Ismail Nalwala is CEO of Work 365 I SMA I L NA LWA L A : WOR K 3 6 5 “ Profitability with subscription revenue is achieved by adding new customers and acquiring organic growth in existing accounts”
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