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Subscription Management

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Table of Contents

Overview

A subscription consists of a selection of customer services billed on a recurring, usage or one-time basis.  A subscription can also include the necessary hardware to deliver the services.

Subscriptions follow a normal or prepaid billing model.  In the normal billing model, the subscription can be billed before or after customers start using the included goods and services while in the prepaid billing model, the goods and services are paid in advance.

This guide aims to explain how CRM.COM modules interact with each other and provide a comprehensive solution for handling and managing a subscription business.

Best practice solutions for billing subscriptions:



Subscriptions in CRM.COM

From the moment a customer calls to subscribe, several CRM.COM modules interact to provide a comprehensive solution for the subscription TV or triple play business,

Products and pricing

In CRM.COM, subscriptions consist of products (services and/or installed items) that can be billed and provided to customers. There are two types of Products that can be added to a subscription:

  1. Services, such as TV channels, broadband services and movies, which can be:  
    • Recurring and renewed automatically every month
    • Added once and billed according to their usage
    • One-off, added once and billed with a flat fee. 
  2. Hardware items (Installed Items) that are necessary for the provision of services, such as decoders or modems.
    Hardware is stored in Warehouses.  The stock balance of goods in one or multiple warehouses can be inspected at any time.

The cost of each product and the possible discounts that can be applied are defined in a Price Plan.  Discounts can be offered based on the quantity purchased or subscription conditions (such as the billing frequency, binding period or account classification).

Usage service catalogs are used instead of price plans for services charged based on their consumption, such as telephony and data.


Subscription packages and billing rules

Billing term schemes establish contract term options and rules for billing subscriptions, including billing frequencies, binding periods and available price plans.

Subscription types represent the packages a company offers to its subscribers and consist of products, prices, billing rules and provisioning providers (combined into a single offering).

The billing definition translates the rules of a business into system rules, administering the billing of a subscription throughout its life cycle. For example, definition rules prescribe allowed billing frequencies, binding periods, the possibility to pause subscriptions, cancellation penalties and recurring fees.  Billing and subscription rules are taken into consideration each time a subscription action is executed.

 

Integration with provisioning hosts

A provisioning provider system/host is an external system that is responsible for the delivery of signals to subscriber devices, based on the CRM.COM services of the subscriber. Examples of provisioning providers and their use include:

  • A Conditional access system (CAS) delivering content to decoders for DTH and DTT subscriptions
  • A Video/IPTV platform streaming OTT content to tablets  
  • The RADIUS server providing network service to a modem.  

The CRM.COM provisioning provider integration submits requests to the provisioning hosts either asynchronously, in the case of batch processing, or in real-time.  The provisioning host replies to CRM.COM with the respective responses. A number of providers that follow a real-time model also support batch processing (subscriptions that get out of sync are synchronized at a later stage).

CRM.COM is integrated with several provisioning systems, such as Conax Contego, Nagra, Perception, Verimatrix, Icarius, and Panaccess.  Refer to Provisioning for a comprehensive list.

Subscriber contact, financial, and subscription details

In CRM.COM, subscriber details are saved under contact information.  A person (or company) is considered a customer once their accounts receivable (the financial account of the subscriber) is created.  The use of the accounts receivable depends on the subscription billing model. 

  • Normal subscriptions or jobs: The account keeps a record of bills and payments for services and hardware. Bills and payments increase and decrease the account balance, respectively. 

  • Prepaid subscriptions: The accounts receivable is used mainly as an identifier and manages the relation between the subscriber and the wallet used for payments.

Agents and new subscribers can easily register a subscription directly in CRM.COM, through a mobile app or portal, which can be integrated with CRM.COM using available WEB API.

Subscriptions inherit their offerings, pricing, billing and business rules from the subscription type used to create them.

Subscription management

CRM.COM features a selection of subscription actions that can be selected to meet various business requirements. For example, actions can be used to deactivate subscriptions for a short period without billing the subscribers (in case of a technical issue), or to 'rest' (pause) the subscription of a customer that will be absent for two months. Actions can be used to add and remove services and hardware, bill the subscription, provide discounts, change contract terms and more. 

Subscription batch processes make it possible to modify multiple subscriptions simultaneously (e.g., to activate/deactivate subscriptions or execute scheduled actions in one flow).  They are easy to set up and can be scheduled to run as often as necessary. 

Customer relationship management

Communications and Notifications are customer relationship management modules.  They are used to communicate the status of subscriptions and to convey marketing messages and other information.

Whereas notifications convey identical information and are sent simultaneously to multiple recipients selected using user-defined conditions, communications send information directly to a single subscriber. Notifications and communications modules can use templates that provide ready-made structure and content, as well as tags, which are automatically replaced with values specific to the customer when the message is sent.


Recommended Reading

Integrating with CRM.COM

 


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