Why The Right Tech Is Crucial For Your Subscription Business

To give users the quality of experience they crave, as well as deliver backend functionality and integration with your wider business, developing the right tech platform is crucial to the success of a subscription business.

Putting together a truly great piece of subscription software involves understanding the needs of your customers, your staff, and your business. Within that, there also have to be considerations made to what tech is already in place, and what can be adapted to work the way you want. So where do you start?

A deep dive is needed

In its most basic form, a subscription service must be able to allow for the repeatable delivery of services or products to a customer. While that seems very simple, there is a huge amount that goes into that on a day-to-day basis. Firstly, you want the platform to behave in a way that is recognizable to customers. It needs to ‘feel’ the same as the other digital platforms you have – this means UX is a big focus.

After you’ve dealt with the frontend is when things start to get a lot more complicated. Your subscription platform is likely going to interact with both your CRM and ERP solutions. You’re going to need to be able to take payments, allocate stock, and update customer records – so already it’s a very involved platform that simply won’t work without effective integration.

A significant component of the subscription landscape you create is actively involved in interactions with users. However, there is also an asynchronous side on the backend that should be taken into account. You might have a robust frontend that serves numerous customers, but for your existing systems, can they simultaneously handle the scale of your targeted user base?

Some customers that we work with have systems that are 40 years old. There is a fear there that anything you try to integrate them with will cause them to fall over. So it’s imperative to take into account the capability of your existing systems before making any development choices.

How it's done

When it comes to how we integrate what we build with all these systems, we tend to bring our own technologies. Often we are in contact with enterprise-type organizations which are typically pretty mature. For example, they might already have subscription capabilities within their tech landscape.

In general, and you might be the same, our clients want us to recommend the best options available. After all, we’re experts, and we’re grateful that the businesses which work with us are confident enough in our experience that they let us make suggestions based on their precise needs.

Future proofing is really important for us. Everything we build needs to be adjustable, so you can add things to it in the future. For instance, a business might want to separate the subscription side of their offering so that they can see how it is doing compared to the existing business. But once it has proven its value, it may need integrating further into their systems. Anything we build has an eye firmly on the future.

To make that future proofing possible, we really encourage our clients to develop a roadmap. Not just a functionality road map, but a business and IT roadmap to show how important the concept of technology being the business itself really is. The roadmap needs to show a software’s limitations, how it aligns with wider business goals, and how its development is going to achieve them.

We’re the experts at subscription development, so if you want help – speak to rb2.