Zuora, Inc. (NYSE: ZUO), the leading subscription management platform provider, today announced major enhancements to its flagship Zuora Billing application and the launch of Zuora Analytics, extending its suite of Order to Revenue applications. With new advanced usage-based pricing capabilities, native ramp deals, an adaptive performance engine and self-service analytics for subscription metrics, the latest enhancements enable subscription businesses to seamlessly monetize, orchestrate and analyze the success of the subscription experiences they offer customers.
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More than ever before, companies are recognizing the need to build meaningful, digital customer experiences to accelerate growth long-term. That’s why a recent Fortune survey found that nearly two-thirds of Fortune 500 CEOs said today’s climate is accelerating their technological transformations.
However, each company and industry faces different market challenges and customer demands for digital initiatives, as well as a variety of strategies to monetize their services and succeed: pricing and packaging, diversification of revenue streams, customer retention or the launch of entirely new services. While most traditional customer experience investments focus on the customer front end of the business, Subscription Economy® leaders focus on backend processes that orchestrate subscription activities throughout their entire lifecycle – from the initial order to revenue processes to analysis of core subscription metrics.
“As subscription business models become more complex, global, and a significant revenue stream, having a clear and real-time understanding of what is going right and wrong in the business is critical, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Mark Thomason, Research Director at IDC. “It is important for businesses to invest in analytics which can drive automated actions so your company can react quickly to issues and adapt to evolving customer demands.”
To effectively orchestrate subscription experiences, business leaders need to have visibility into their subscription KPIs. To develop a standard of core success metrics for the Subscription Economy, The Subscribed Institute created its Definitive Guide of Subscription Metrics. The guide outlines five of the most critical metric categories for subscription businesses to monitor in order to help inform and drive unparalleled subscription experiences: recurring revenue, subscriber, subscriber value, retention and receivable metrics.
To arm teams with the tools they need to design agile subscription experiences and drive confidence across their organizations, Zuora announced the general availability of:
- Advanced Usage Charge Models: With new, advanced usage-based monetization capabilities, including Multi-Attribute Pricing, High Water Mark, and Pre-Rated pricing models, customers can achieve the flexibility and agility needed to build their own charge models and ultimately scale their business while designing the best experience for their subscribers. A Subscribed Institute benchmark found that companies with usage-based pricing making up between 1-25% of their overall revenue grew 30% faster than those with no usage-based pricing.
- Ramp Deals: With native ramp deals, customers can design the preferred enterprise subscription experience, locking in multi-year bookings up front. The latest enhancement orchestrates traditionally manual financial processes, reducing time to value.
- Zuora Analytics: Backed by the Subscribed Institute’s Definitive Guide to Subscription Metrics, Zuora Analytics enables customers to measure and analyze their subscription business using a standard set of metrics from a single, automated, self-service dashboard. With Zuora Analytics, organizations now have the rich subscription data and trend analysis needed to inform critical business decisions.
- Adaptive Performance Engine: With the introduction of adaptive, self-optimizing performance engine, customers can now reduce the time it takes to complete a bill run, which encapsulates billing processes like charge rate calculation, tax calculation and subscription renewal, by 40-95% to reach performances of up to 3 million invoices/hour, according to Zuora’s Imagine Bill Runs 10x Faster blog. The new engine drives operational efficiencies including the reduction of overdue accounts, billing delays, errors and more, while driving faster collection time and allowing for more time to perform invoice validation processes.
“The enhancements to Zuora Billing and the launch of Zuora Analytics provide the foundation subscription businesses need to manage all aspects of the subscription experience – from the best suited charge models for monetization and the complete orchestration of the order to revenue process, to the deep analysis of customer data to optimize performance of digital strategies,” said Chris Battles, Chief Product Officer at Zuora. “At the end of the day, customers are your number one asset and we’re excited to fuel new, innovative and agile experiences in today’s Subscription Economy.”
Companies across all industries are leveraging Zuora’s latest Zuora Billing and Zuora Analytics solutions, with early adopters including OCTO, CallRail and Absorb Software.
“Zuora’s Multi-Attribute Pricing reduces the overhead of managing subscriptions and allows us to manage the multitude of price points in a single configuration system. Introducing new features, such as touchless rental and parking options, to complement our on-demand intelligent mobility solution can be easily configured and immediately available to our entire customer base,” said Edwin Colella, Chief Marketing Officer at OCTO, a leading smart telematics company delivering mobility solutions and connected insurance, which launched in Zuora in 2017.
“Zuora Analytics allows us to get subscription metrics in an efficient, timely manner without the manual work in spreadsheets. As a CFO, I’m always looking for new ways to view and analyze data and then share information within our company through easy-to-consume dashboards. This is next level analytics and one of the biggest benefits of Zuora,” said Jim Morgan, Chief Financial Officer at CallRail, a call tracking and marketing analytics software.
“As a SaaS company providing flexible pricing for a diverse set of clients, Zuora Billing and CPQ are a perfect fit for our business needs. The new native ramp deals functionality enables us to report on multi-year ramp deals, and provides further flexibility for us to create varying levels of prices, or discounts, that fit our new and existing client budgets. We are also excited with the enhancements in MRR net of discounts. We can now save precious time by creating multiple amendments in a single order. These features will help us focus on expanding our business, and provide accurate metrics to our board members and executive teams,” said Emad Issa, Business Process Administration Team Lead, Absorb Software, a learning management system.
