Subscribers are the lifeblood of an OTT site. Marketing to subscribers, acquiring new subscribers, processing payments, analyzing performance, reducing churn and help desk/support are at the core of an OTT operation.
There are tons of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms to help you get the job done, but in order to maximize efficiency and have a seamless experience from registration to billing to middleware integration to customer support; a custom CRM built for OTT is the recipe for success.
Here we break down 4 critical CRM features and functionalities required for a smooth operating OTT platforms.
1. Subscription management
Want to get paid on time? How about easily handling your entire billing lifecycle? You need a powerful subscription management system to handle…
- Streamlined customer acquisition
- Easy management of customer subscriptions
- Rich subscription and customer data/metrics
- Global billing automation and customization
- Accepting and processing global payments
Free trials and driving conversion
You’re looking for a CRM that turns your potential customers into real ones. Free trials are critical to getting the ball rolling in acquiring new customers. Trial automation is one of the most important features a CRM can have.
You need to have important features like:
- Trial automation
- Trial extensions
- Trial-ending reminders with a payment link
- Easy-to-create custom checkout page
- Easy integration with payment gateways/processing
2. Sales automation
Sales Automation enables users to automate repetitive, manual tasks, streamline their work and improve productivity. Sales Automation can free up time so a sales team can focus on more meaningful, strategic tasks and winning deals.
Customized automation should help you with big things like…
- Lead management
- Account management
- Deal management
- Contact management
- Trial management
Even mundane tasks such as…
- Scheduling appointments
- Sending emails
- Tracking contacts
- Updating sales opportunities
…can be major wins in regaining time in a salesperson’s day. Automation of these tasks helps your sales team to concentrate on creating leads, closing those leads, and growing your relationships with customers over their entire lifecycle.
3. Analytics
Strong analytics enables you to gain greater insights into how your business is performing. Analytics provides big picture issues such as identifying where the potentials churn the most or measuring the overall efficiency of your sales pipeline. Build forecasts, evaluate team performance, and track KPIs.
- Actionable insights for everyone: C-level employees, sales reps, and managers alike benefit from powerful CRM analytics – data-driven decisions are the key to success.
Slice and Dice Data: Discover trends in data to create a holistic view of your leads, tasks, quotes, and much more. - Advanced Filters: Dynamic filtering allows for quick and effective sifting of data. Powerful drill-down capabilities.
- Share and export: Export reports in a number of file types including PDF and Excel. Reports are embeddable and shareable to Slack.
- Templates for easy analysis: Choose from predefined templates of multiple chart types.
4. Customer Care and Support
Customer care and support are core to a successful OTT operation.
Building an integrated solution with a ticketing system that tracks issues, generates trouble tickets, creates resolutions and analyzes the business is key to a smooth operation.
An automated help desk improves sales agent productivity, keeps subscribers happy, and builds loyal users. It can transform your customer service experience with a context-aware help desk.
See subscriber issues through to a successful closing.
Customer care is a mission-critical system that enables your agents to effectively and efficiently support your subscribers. Deliver consistent, quality support that keeps customers satisfied and tickets resolved in a timely manner.
Conclusion:
It is fairly obvious that if you are building a scalable OTT solution, a custom-built CRM is the way to go. You need a powerful solution that controls subscriber management, payments, sales automation, and agent sales performance.
Creating a well-defined process for customer issues and resolutions will go a long way to reduce churn, make sales operations more efficient and create happy customers. The ability to analyze data and gain insights into the business is the formula for success.
Originally published at setplex.com blog on January 24, 2022.