The latest Zuora Central upgrade – welcome Zuora Orders

In a subscription world, more than half of your company’s growth and revenue comes from expansions into the existing install base.

In fact, our data shows that 70% of subscription revenue on average comes from existing customers.

  • Upsell of an add-on products
  • Cross-sell of a different product
  • User or volume increase
  • Price increase or discount decrease
  • Renewals

The tricky part is, order management for these types of subscription changes are often the most difficult to process.

Why is that?

Well, order management is century old process of “fulfilling the goods that a customer has ordered.” In a subscription business model, order management gets tricky because subscriptions are constantly changing and evolving.

With the rise of SaaS and subscriptions in many industries, companies today think differently about order management. If you’re signed up with Amazon Prime, Zendesk, Pandora, Adobe Creative Suite, and other subscription offerings – you don’t just make one-time purchases. Instead, you have the option to constantly subscribe, upgrade, downgrade, pause, and change your subscription over time to suit your needs.

Your finance and operations teams have to keep up with these constant changes in order to support the growth of your business. Today, that’s done in spreadsheets and through large, burdensome IT customizations.

Order management has changed. The technology that powers order management hasn’t.

 

As we work with our customers, we increasingly see companies take on more and more complex change orders to support the customer experience and drive growth. Specifically, 3 use cases jump out at us:

  • Sales teams are increasingly using built-in ramps to drive a “land and expand” strategy
  • Customers often request more than 1 change for a single subscription
  • Companies selling to districts, resellers, and networks need to update dozens or hundreds of subscriptions at once

 

What happens when companies can’t solve this? The pain is widespread.

  • Sales teams are unable to build in expansion across the customer relationship and unable to create expansion opportunities without lengthy workarounds.
  • Finance teams struggle with reporting and are buried in manual work to reconcile the revenue impact of every change order.
  • IT teams waste time customizing solutions for Order entry, Revenue recognition integrations, Provisioning,  CPQ data integration, and Customer Portal integration

We’re solving this in Spring ’18.

Introducing Zuora Orders, the latest addition to the Zuora Central Platform.

We’ve upgraded the Central Platform with a modern order management solution designed for subscription companies, giving your customers the unlimited flexibility to sign-up, upgrade, downgrade, pause, resume, and make changes whenever they want.

 

Subscription Orders Engine

 

There are 3 key things you need to know about the upgrade:

1. Unlimited flexibility for any subscription or subscription change

  • Build in expansion over the customer relationship
    • Instead of overselling an initial contract, sales can now design quotes with built-in ramps for pricing, discounts, and products.
  • Update existing subscriptions with much more ease and flexibility
    • Easily make multiple changes to an existing subscription.
    • Make multiple changes to multiple subscriptions at once for reseller, distributed, or hierarchical accounts.
    • Track the impact of every order across the subscription history.
  • Capture and unify orders across assisted-sales, self-serve, and partner channels

2. New order metrics and dashboards

  • Out-of-the-box order metrics
    • Slice and dice MRR and other subscription metrics across multiple dimensions, such as product line or region
    • See Daily, MoM, and YoY changes across key metrics, including Net Retention, Churn Rate, CMRR, and more.
  • A new configurable and shareable dashboard
    • Add and remove cards, apply filters, change time periods, group by conditions, or change metrics entirely
    • Easily share trend charts and tables with team members, on web, mobile or via API

3. Comprehensive data required for ASC 606 compliant revenue

  • Integration to Zuora RevPro for full order-to-revenue automation
    • There is now a productized integration from the Central platform to RevPro
    • Data is pre-mapped so that your bookings, billings, and usage data flows seamlessly to RevPro
    • Shave time off of implementation for a revenue automation system since the data is premapped
    • Every change order in the Zuora platform becomes a contract modification in RevPro
  • All the data you need for other revenue automation systems
    • With the upgrade, you now have a completely redone data structure to give you everything you need for ASC 606 compliant revenue recognition.
    • You can simply extract this data from Zuora and use it for your revenue automation system of choice.

 

We’re extremely excited to introduce this upgrade in Spring ‘18. If you’re a customer and want more information, reach out to your Customer Account Manager.

Can’t wait? Put your name down here.

#spring18

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