Zuora Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Recurring Customer And Billing Management, Q3 2017

Did you catch the latest “Wave?”

Zuora was named a leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Recurring Customer And Billing Management, Q3 2017” report (Forrester Research, Inc., July 31, 2017, Lily Varon).

The report evaluates 35 criteria of recurring customer and billing management providers to demonstrate how each provider “measures up and helps digital business strategy professionals choose the products that best fit their needs.” We’re so proud to announce that of the nine vendors evaluated, Zuora received the highest scores for Current Offering and Strategy.

As Forrester reports, leaders want flexible software to manage recurring billing and customer needs. As more and more companies shift to subscription business models, they need to solve for the unique challenges that go along with these models, from complex billing to revenue recognition, lifecycle management, and beyond.

We’ve been saying for a while now that legacy technology is outdated and we think that Forrester’s report seems to back this up. According to Forrester, “Agility, automation, and analytics are key differentiators. As legacy technology becomes outdated and less effective, leading vendors will prove that they understand the customer experience impact of billing technology. How? These solutions will improve business agility for their buyers to react to changing market conditions; automate consequences to customer life-cycle changes; and provide actionable, recurring customer- and revenue-focused insights.”

In addition to the highest scores for Current Offering and Strategy, we also received the highest score for the Insights and Reporting criterion. With, according to Forrester, 51% of global decision makers planning to “improve the use of data and analytics technology,” insights and reporting are more important than ever.

Zuora Insights, our Subscription Metrics Engine, helps customers turn their data into actionable growth strategies. Subscription businesses need a whole new set of metrics to measure the health of their business. Zuora Insights enables businesses to monitor key financial metrics, identify subscriber behaviors, trend key events, predict churn and renewals, gauge usage, uncover new opportunities, and more.

According to Amy Andriano, Product Experience Manager at Invoca, “Before Zuora, we never had a single source of truth for our subscribers. It used to take us more than 20 business intelligence reports, help from analytics experts, and weeks of work to get a single data point. With Insights, we now have a single platform to measure the health of our subscribers and identify new upsell and cross-sell opportunities we never knew existed.”

We also received the highest score possible for Integration and Extensibility, which we believe is thanks to Zuora Connect, an Expansive collection of 100+ apps, delivering extensibility and customization to the Zuora Central platform.

Leveraged by some of the world’s largest global enterprises including Schneider Electric, CLEAR and NCR, “Zuora Connect allows enterprises to rapidly innovate and precisely tailor their subscription infrastructure to meet the unique demands of their subscribers,” says Tom Krackeler, SVP Product at Zuora. “Our growing ecosystem of partners and applications gives our customers access to continuous subscription management innovation and a competitive advantage to monetize any service.”

And we are thrilled to have received the highest score in The Forrester Wave™ for the Supporting Products and Services criterion which we believe is largely a result of our core supporting services: Customer Success. Customer Success is at the heart of everything we do. And Zuora Central™, the only cloud-based solution that automates subscription order-to-cash operations in real-time, is at the heart of our customer’s businesses.

According to Symantec CIO Sheila Jordan (at our recent Subscribed San Francisco conference), “Zuora never was a vendor. You’ve always been an incredible partner to us. You promised and came through to build the roadmap with us. You call it a hub. I call it a heart. And Zuora didn’t miss a beat. Other customers claim they are customer friendly, and sometimes during licensing negotiations, it turns out not to be true. But you deliver.”

Forrester’s research uncovers the business impact of customer-centric billing solutions to enable recurring customer relationships. We see this as the core of the Subscription Economy. According to Zuora Founder and CEO Tien Tzuo, “Ten years ago, we predicted the emergence of the Subscription Economy where companies large and small would shift their business models from product-focused to subscriber-centric. We are proud to have built the market’s leading platform to automate subscription order-to-cash operations for customers in all industries. We will continue to invest and innovate to ensure they flourish in the future of the Subscription Economy.”

Download “The Forrester Wave™: Recurring Customer and Billing Management, Q3 2017” full report.

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