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Subscriptions

A subscription is a collection of services a Contact subscribes to, billed for regularly. Apart from the services provided, the subscription also outlines how and when the Contact will be billed, as well as the payment terms.

In general, a subscription’s main characteristics are:

• Has a state that is derived from the state of its services

  • Active: There’s at least one Effective service

  • Inactive: There are no Effective services (and at least one non-churned)

  • Churn: All of the services were churned

• The billing day of the services (day of month or week)

• Has a payment method which is one of the contact's payment methods, the one that the contact opted in to be used for paying their recurring charges

Services

Contacts subscribed to various services. Priority in the fact that contact subscribes to services, no subscriptions

How contacts can subscribe:

• Through the ordering flow

• Web APIs

• UI by adding services on the contact or an existing non-churned subscription

A service’s price terms designate its billing behaviour:

• Billing Cycle - how often it will be billed

• Auto-renewed and service terms

• Contract Period

• Trial period

• Billing model - pre-/post-bill

• Usage allowance to usage and non-traceable physical goods

States

• Draft, Effective, Not Effective, Paused, Cancelled, Regretted

Subscriber

A contact that is subscribed to at least one non-churned service:

• Active: There’s at least one service in Effective state

• Inactive: All of the services are in Not Effective state

Future Subscriptions & Services

Services scheduled to be added and activated on a subscription, not billed yet.

Changing a service

Contacts request changes to their services in terms of (one or more changes):

• Change their quantity

• Change to another service

• Change their price (change into another price

• with/

• out contract, change into a price with a longer/shorter billing cycle)

• Change the service’s components (in the case of flexible bundles)

Change is classified as a Downgrade or an Upgrade depending on whether the service’s recurring fee is decreased/increased, respectively

Anniversary vs. Period billing

• Anniversary billing: subscriber is billed on the service’s anniversary, which is represented by the date on which the service was first activated.

• Period billing: business specifies a day of the month on which all of the subscribers will be billed. Therefore all subscribers have the same billing period.

Calendar Billing

• How the subscription’s billing day will be set (anniversary or period)

  • Anniversary: A service’s anniversary day, it’s the date when it was first activated

  • Period billing: All services are billed on the same day, a date set by the business.

    • For annual subscriptions, there’s also the ability to specify the month of year up until which the service will be billed. It can be used for subscriptions when it’s also required to specify an end date.

• When the billing day is reset (on which events) - re-activation, upgrade, resume)

• Immediate & Delayed alignment

Trial Management

• The trial period included in a service’s price terms

• Trial services are never billed while in the trial; their billing history can only begin on the trial end date

• Applied once per contact OR per service

• While in the trial, the contact cancels with no charges applied and can change to another service.

• The trial period adjusted when changing the service while in trial

• Trial subscribers: contacts with at least one service in Trial.

• A Trial period can be extended but only once and for a specific number of days.

Service Delivery

The process responsible for managing subscription services and delivering them to contacts

• Bills services - issues one invoice/credit note for each subscription

• Performs deactivations based on the outstanding amount

• Performs cancellations after a long period of being Not Effective

• Executes scheduled actions

• Triggered on each subscription event to ensure that the contact’s request can be delivered, i.e. the service is delivered to the contact

Process that cannot be scheduled, all of its batch processes run once a day, on a daily basis. Deactivations are an exception since they might be triggered once an hour (based on configuration)

Service Delivery Estimation

Provides an estimation on if and when a contact’s services can be added/changed on various events, along with an estimation on how these specific changes will be billed (when service will be billed, for how much and when payment is due)

Billing Estimation

Provides an estimation of a contact’s next bill (considering the services to which the contact is currently subscribed)

Recurring billing process

• Part of the Service Delivery process runs on a daily basis (or more if needed)

  • Services billed on their next billing cycle or a number of days before (configurable)

  • Services are automatically invoiced on their trial end date

  • Services expiring excluded

  • Services are also billed based on their scheduled/pending changes within the period being billed.

• Responsible for

  • Identifying which services should be billed and for how long

  • Perform invoice estimation, and if the credit limit is to be exceeded, then funds requested from the PGW service

  • Invoices are issued only if credit limit restriction is met

  • In case of invoicing failure, then the services are eligible for deactivation

  • In case of asynchronous integration with PGw services, then services remain

• • un-billed until the payment is received in CRM.COM (e.g. JCC SEPA)

Automations

• Automatically reactivate service on making a payment

• Notify subscribers of various subscription events (such as on service deactivation, re-activation or change).

Segmentation

• Segment contacts based on the info of their services (trial end date, contract end date, the period being not effective)

• Segment contacts based on the changes they performed to their services

Insights

In-depth analysis of various subscription changes performed over a period of time

• Draft

• New

• In Trial

• Converted

• Not Converted

• Cancel Trial

• Upgrade

• Downgrade

• Cancel

• Regret

Subscription-driven vs. Payment-driven models

• Subscription-driven model: The subscription and its terms drive the services' billing. For example, subscription terms denote the next billing date and the next billing cycle. On reaching the next billing cycle, the service delivery process bills all of the services for one more billing cycle. In case of exceeding the credit limit, then all of the services are eligible for deactivation.

• Payment-driven model: A wallet top-up for a commerce pool that identifies a termed service activates the service. Frequency is the last selected one unless the top-up funds are not enough, in which case a lower frequency can be activated.

Pre-bill vs. Post-bill

Billing models defined in service price terms

• Pre-bill: services are billed in advance/at the beginning of their upcoming billing cycle

• Post-bill: services are billed at the end of each billing cycle.

Usage services are always billed on a post-bill basis.

Usage-based billing

• A usage service is any service consumed and has to be billed based on the volume consumed, like data, phone calls, fuel, and electricity. A usage service has a measurement unit used in measuring the consumed volume and a price per measurement unit.

• A usage service can only be consumed when:

  • a contact subscribes to either a termed service or a one-time service.

  • a contact is a member of a Community and the community owner shares their usage allowance with the members.

• Usage allowance is defined per termed/one-time service price. Usage allowance includes:

  • Accumulated limits in cash amounts: How much can be consumed per transaction/day/billing cycle

  • At which organisations usage can be consumed

  • Which usage and/or non-traceable physical goods can be consumed and optionally cask and usage amount limits

    • If limits are specified, then per transaction/day/billing cycle, the subscriber can consume up until that limits

• Usage consumed is always billable, unless no price is defined

• Usage allowance can be overridden per subscription service

  • Contact subscribes to a service that provides usage allowance

  • Business rules specify whether usage allowance of a subscription service can be changed or not

  • In the first case, a back-end user can change a subscriber’s termed service usage allowance.

• Usage records are logged into CRM.COM from third-party systems responsible for monitoring the usage consumption, like Radius servers (for data) and Online Charging Systems.

• CRM.COM billing process accepts the usage records, groups them per termed/one-time service and adds the charges in recurring bills.

• Usage records are billed on a post-bill basis only. All usage records that record usage within a termed/one-time service’s billing cycle are included in the bill.

• A usage record includes:

  • which usage service was consumed

  • how much, when and where it was consumed

  • who consumed the service (might be a contact or a device)

  • optionally it might also include a rated amount (in the case of usage being rated by

• • an Online-Charging-System)

  • note: within a usage record, multiple services and their usage consumption’s details can be specified

Usage Allowance & Communities

The basic pre-requisite for a contact to consume usage, is to subscribe to a termed/one-time service that has usage allowance. However, if a subscriber sets up their own community, they can share this usage allowance among their members.

• Subscribe to a service that includes usage allowance

• Create a Community and start inviting members

• For each member specify how much usage they can consume

  • Usage amount or cash amount

  • Per transaction, day, billing cycle (the billing cycle of the community owner’s service).

  • To all or specific usage services and/or non-traceable physical goods.

• Members consume usage as long as the usage allowance restrictions are not violated

• The owner of the community and the subscription is the one responsible for paying off the usage consumed

Usage Charge Limits

By default, usage consumption is billed on a post-bill basis, i.e. at the end of the billing cycle. However, there might be cases where a business might want to enforce usage billing during the billing cycle once some limits are charged

• When contact consumes an X usage amount (optionally of a specific usage service)

• When a number of usage records are submitted for a contact and a usage service

Business rules can be overridden at contact level. This means that per contact, a back-end user might specify a different set of usage charge limits. The business might want to modify the default business rules for contacts with high credit limits or long billing cycles.

Subscription Devices

• The device through which a service is being used/consumed by contacts, e.g. STB, Router

• A service enabled to multiple devices, each device might provision multiple services. This relation is provisioned to 3rd party systems.

• Device characteristics sent over to provisioning providers

Rentals

• A Rental device is a device owned by the business, BUT it is given to a contact as a rental.

• Rental devices are traceable physical goods ordered by contacts and could have two prices from which contact can select from

  • The rental price denotes that the device will be given to the contact as a rental so that a recurring charge will be applied.

  • The selling price denotes that the device will be sold to the contact

• Contacts must return the rental devices back to the business upon cancelling their services

Subscription Rules

• Trial Management

• Change services

• Cancellations

• Paused period

• Regret

• Grace period

• Service Restrictions

• Service delivery

Billing Rules

• Calendar billing

• Billing

• Rules

• Usage Billing

• Usage Charge Limits

• Event-based charges

  • Apply an expense when a subscription event occurs.

  • One-off charge

  • Charge’s amount can be based on product catalogue OR it could be calculated based on the service’s remaining contract period (latter case applicable for calculating a cancellation fee’s amount)

• Event-based recurring charges

  • Start applying a charge when a subscription event occurs. Recurring charge is removed when another subscription event occurs

  • Recurring charge i.e. charged in each billing cycle.

MRR

• MRR

• Upgrade MRR

• Downgrade MRR

• Cancel MRR

• Regret MRR

• New MRR

• Expand MRR (upgrades+ expansion)

• Churn MRR (downgrades+cancel+regret)

• MRR Growth (new+expand-churn

• MRR)

Subscription Promotions

• Provide a discount on ordering services, but this discount might be applied multiple times and not just at the time of ordering

• Enhanced basket conditions and offerings since termed services have some extra attributes that affect the discount amount and the promotion’s duration

Analytics

• Dashboards

  • View Subscription statistics information from the following dashboards:

    • Home

    • Subscriptions Overview

• Reports

  • Subscriptions Summary - View active subscriptions, their services and any provisioning devices.

  • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) - A detailed analysis of monthly recurring revenue earned from contact subscriptions.

  • MRR Growth (MRR) -

  • Services Performance - View services performance.

  • Services Summary - View services summary.

• Insights

  • Create insights for Subscriptions by specifying criteria and filtering options using events:

    • Subscription (Event Type filter used to differentiate the various subsciption events).