Subscription & Billing Management
Introducing self-serve expansion opportunities and subscription management.
Podium Growth/Expansion
3+ Months
Began shipping in Q1 2023
Our goal was to build a self-serve way for users to manage their billing and subscription as well as expand their services through add-ons and upgrades.
Discovery and definition
Before this project, Podium users were unable to manage their billing information, invoices, and subscription directly through the product. This lead to inconvenience, frustration, and a high volume of support tickets as users were unable to make necessary updates and access important information easily themselves.
The Growth team at Podium spearheaded an initiative to design and implement a subscription hub that catered to the needs of both free-trial and non-free trial customers and their various plan structures. We recognized the need to introduce a net-new subscription management hub in order to streamline customer support processes. The hub was intended to empower customers to self-serve for account updates, billing inquiries, cancellation requests, as well as the manual expansion of their plan through add-ons and upgrades—ultimately enhancing the customer experience and reducing the support backlog while introducing a new stream of revenue for Podium.
We ran a support backlog analysis and found that out of 10,000 cases within the 30 days prior to the start of the project—account update requests accounted for 13% of cases, cancellations for 11%, and billing inquiries for 6%—meaning that 30% of our support cases were related to processes that could be self-served by the customer if they had the ability to in the product.
Prior to the start of the project, Podium solved a lot of their problems through a process dubbed “swivel chair,” meaning someone had to manually update changes on the backend for every request. These manual processes create a lot of technical constraints for the team.
Challenges & Opportunities
The primary challenge apart from the high volume of cases straining the support team and affecting customer satisfaction was the varying complexities of customer plans. Podium has a history of changing their plan structures as well as a sales team that has consistently taken creative liberties when it came to selling unique pricing and plan packages. This high amount of permutation in the data created a lot of technical constraints for the team that we had to work through.
User Problem — Podium users were facing difficulty managing their billing information, invoices, and subscription manually. This was leading to inconvenience and frustration as users were unable to make necessary updates and access important information easily.
Business Problem — First, Podium was receiving a large volume of support cases that was straining the support team and affecting customer satisfaction. This was taking up significant support resources and leading to reduced efficiency and increased cost. Roughly 30% of support cases were related to plan management, invoices, or billing inquiries and CSAT was hovering around 43% at the start of the project.
Secondly, Podium was losing out on in-app expansion opportunities. This meant that potential growth revenue was being lost, which could have been captured if users were able to easily upgrade their plans or purchase add-ons manually. Additionally, if users were able to upgrade via self-serve then Podium could directly promote those opportunities.
