FOSTER CITY, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 15, 2016) - Zuora , Inc., the world's leading provider of subscription billing, commerce, and finance solutions, today announced the general availability of its Zuora® Insights ™ solution. The Zuora Insights solution helps companies move into the next phase of maturity in the Subscription Economy® where they can apply data and analytics to maximize growth and reduce churn. By unifying financial, behavioral and demographic data sources, companies can now improve relationships with their subscribers by analyzing usage patterns, subscriber preferences and financial metrics to uncover opportunities to proactively engage, upsell, cross-sell and retain customers.
Driven by digital transformation and the need to quickly launch and scale new services, organizations in every industry are embracing subscription-based business models. Many of today's most innovative companies have radically transformed their operations using subscriber-centric, recurring-revenue strategies that provide the agility and flexibility they need to create deeper and longer-lasting relationships with customers to maximize growth. By the end of 2017, two-thirds of the CEOs of the Global 2000 are expected to have digital transformation at the center of their corporate strategy , and rightly so, as new data shows that subscription-based companies are growing nine times faster than those in the S&P 500 .
"Subscription Economy business models are maturing and becoming more sophisticated. Today customers are asking how they can continue to improve relationships with their subscribers to grow even faster," said Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora. "Businesses must evolve their thinking from just knowing the financial metrics they run their businesses on, to understanding the drivers of growth and retention, then proactively acting on them to outperform the competition."
Subscription businesses generate about 23% percent of revenue through upsells and expansions to existing customers, so success depends on reducing attrition and maximizing the revenue opportunity from existing subscribers. To do this, the most successful businesses in the Subscription Economy simultaneously develop a deep data-driven understanding of customer demographics and behavior, including usage intensity trends, user similarities, engagement level, churn probability, user personas, and more, while applying this information to understand the drivers of their growth metrics - such as monthly recurring revenue, net dollar retention, lifetime value, and contracted utilization.
"It is impossible to understand and manage a subscription-business using product-centric, rather than customer-centric, metrics," said Amy Konary, vice president, IDC. "Instead, companies that are trying to grow their subscription based businesses need to develop a very deep understanding of subscriber behavior by looking at the right data in the right way -- with new metrics that make sense for a recurring revenue business. In order to accomplish this, companies need systems that support the capture and analysis of metrics that track closely to subscriber behavior, and processes and business models that wrap around customers -- not just around products."
Until today, subscription businesses were limited by legacy infrastructure and a sprawl of subscriber data living in multiple systems across the organization. ERP and CRM have data models that make it impossible to capture the nuances of subscription metrics, and today's popular order-to-cash systems that simply aren't designed to help companies effectively combine multiple data sources, develop algorithms that lead to the right metrics, and present insights in a way that supports rapid, specific actions.
"To keep up with the enormous opportunity of the Subscription Economy, corporate financial systems must function differently than they have in the past, maturing with the fast-growth companies they empower," said Tom Krackeler, Senior Vice President, Products. "Strategic business decisions can be made based on Zuora Insights' data-backed predictions that identify which price plans should yield the best financial results, whether revenue per user is being maximized, who are the best upsell and cross-sell candidates, which subscribers are at risk of churn, in what product areas a company should invest, and more."
Key Capabilities of the Zuora Insights Solution As part of Zuora's core subscription business platform, the Zuora Insights solution enables subscription businesses to accurately predict renewals and churn, access real-time monitoring of opportunities and risks, and take concrete steps to lead to better business outcomes.
Key capabilities of the Zuora Insights solution that make informed business decisions possible include:
- Subscriber identity. A unified view of a subscriber's financial, demographic and behavioral data from the Zuora subscription management solution and other analytics and customer relationship management databases.
- Subscriber segments. Functionality to group subscribers by common traits and behaviors to uncover patterns that lead to adoption, upsell and cross-sell opportunities or signs of churn.
- Calculated metrics. Turn any subscriber behavior into a metric by calculating its frequency (daily, weekly or monthly) in counts, averages, percentiles, ratios and more. Compare these trends with vital subscription billing metrics like MRR, subscription length and total spend over time.
- Predictive scoring. Developed by Zuora's chief data scientist, machine learning algorithms predict customer churn and propensity to renew based on the subscriber metrics tailored to every business.
- Salesforce sync. Integration with Salesforce to sync subscriber segments with CRM data to automatically create upsell or cross-sell opportunities by looking at customer behaviors in segments for outbound marketing.
Download the Zuora Insights product sheet for more information or contact Zuora at sales@zuora.com .
Customer Quotes "Access to, and analytics around, a quality singular source of customer data is the most important tool for any media company," said Geoff DeFrance, SVP Digital Automotive at TEN: The Enthusiast Network. "We're working with Zuora Insights to ensure we have a competitive advantage in this area. As we work to combine all our subscription and financial data, coupled with demographic and usage data, and also roll in the marketing stack, we will know exactly where churn risks and ARPU opportunities lie. From there we will be able to proactively tailor content and promotional offers to customers immediately. We believe Zuora Insights will make a big impact on our business."
"Before Zuora, we never had a single source of truth for our subscribers, said Amy Andriano, Product Experience Manager at Invoca. "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."
"Zuora Insights has been a game changer for my organization, said Shannon Kluczny, VP Client Services at BizLibrary. "We sought a solution to collect, analyze and provide real time data about our clients' activities, engagement and goals. Zuora Insights has rapidly increased our ability to accurately predict churn, highlight problem areas and provided valuable data points and statistics to all levels of the organization and we have transitioned from being reactive to being proactive. Since implementation, we have increased overall dollar retention by nine percent, client retention by six percent and have secured record-breaking upgrades over the past 12 months."
Additional Resources Zuora Insights Product Sheet Subscription Economy Index " The Subscription Economy: A Business Transformation " by Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora SlideShare: " Drivers of Success in the Subscription Economy " Follow us online: Facebook.com/zuora @Zuora #SubscriptionEconomy
About Zuora, Inc. Zuora's Relationship Business Management (RBM)™ solution helps enable businesses in any industry to launch or shift products to subscription, implement new pay-as-you-go pricing and packaging models, gain new insights into subscriber behavior, open new revenue streams, and disrupt market segments to gain competitive advantage. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, London, Paris, Beijing, Sydney and Tokyo. Zuora clients come from a wide range of industries, including media, travel services, consumer packaged goods, cloud services, and telecommunications. Clients include Financial Times, Schneider Electric, Box, Honeywell, NCR, RTL, The Guardian, YP.com, BlueJeans, Shutterfly, TripAdvisor and Vivint.
© 2016 Zuora, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Zuora, Insights, Relationship Business Management (RBM), and Subscription Economy are trademarks of Zuora, Inc. Third party trademarks mentioned above are owned by their respective companies. Nothing in this press release should be construed to the contrary, or as an approval, endorsement or sponsorship by any third parties of Zuora or any aspect of this press release. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com .
