The good news is that we’re growing far faster than we anticipated and, for that, we have to thank our various clients, some of whom never heard the word recession. The better news is that we are introducing a whole set of product innovations that we believe will enable merchants selling digital content to even more rapidly generate benefits from SaaS billing.
Our latest release, announced today, is the first in a series that focuses on bringing the power of customer acquisition and retention to the “post-pay” world. What do we mean by that? A “pre-pay” model is one in which a customer pays in advance of the service being used or consumed. Vindicia CashBox has traditionally focused on this model and the markets that adopt it. The marketing and billing processes in a pre-pay model typically orient around “automatic payment” methods — credit cards, debit cards, pre-paid cards, and others. Conversely, a “post-pay” model is one in which customers pay after the service has been used. Businesses presenting invoices have often (though not always) fallen into the post-pay world.
The reality is that most companies dealing with invoicing have traditionally focused on automating the order-to-cash process, and specifically on minimizing days-sales-outstanding (DSO). That is absolutely a noteworthy pursuit and one that CashBox natively supports, but frankly misses the bigger picture around customer retention. After all, the benefit of reducing DSO by 10% can be completely offset by your customer retention % falling as well, and this effect is magnified if you are a subscription business.
We focus a lot of our time and effort in understanding how to optimize your customer retention efforts, independent of what business model your online service supports. It’s also why we can state unequivocally that we added more than $50 million to our clients’ top line in 2010. We look forward to reaching that $100 million mark soon.
Scale is another critical aspect of the billing process and one that Vindicia has focused on from our inception. We understand what it means to handle hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, support billing in various currencies across different payment methods, calculate necessary taxes across different global tax regimes, and communicating with end-users in their language of choice.
Whether your billing model supports subscriptions or microtransactions, invoices or automatic payments or both, or credit cards or electronic checks, you can be assured that CashBox will focus on optimizing your acquisition and retention efforts across a highly scalable SaaS billing infrastructure.
