sticky.io (formerly LimeLight), headquartered in San Francisco, offers their subscription business management platform supporting ecommerce transactions and recurring billing along with customer management, payment gateway, and fraud protected transacting.
N/A
Zuora
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Zuora is one of the best-known subscription billing platforms. Zuora is an enterprise-level product and, as such, provides comprehensive metrics, tax automation, and support for multiple currencies. It also offers Salesforce and NetSuite integration out-of the-box. It often replaces cumbersome ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that does not focus exclusively on billing.
Lime Light CRM was built specifically for online marketers, helping them to manage their online sales, contacts, orders, and payments. The software combines a number of features and 3rd party provider integrations to offer the ability to store customer data, build online eCommerce campaigns, create sales reports, and automate order management activities, as well as track, store and report on affiliate data.
Zuroa is very well-suited for B2B businesses that primarily have a subscription stream of revenue. It is less appropriate for B2C and retail, if you are only selling one-time products or services, this tool would be overkill and confusing instead of helpful. However, if you need to recognize revenue from subscriptions over the service period, Zuora is a lifesaver.
For an easy to learn CRM this would be it, you can fully train someone on Limelight in less than a few days
It allows for various wildcard searches to be performed in different fields, which speeds up productivity and requires less request to repeat information to locate accounts while speaking to clients.
The CRM holds multiple user accounts and products, and shows failed attempts to purchase and gives reason codes for why the purchase was not successful. Allows for different views to review client accounts.
The implementation of Zuora is very helpful. Their interactive training guides are one of the best I've used. It is very thorough and any salesperson can learn how to use it very quickly.
Their subscription management offers many ways to sell a subscription. These subscriptions can be evergreen (renewing every month) or termed subscriptions. The subscriptions can be amended to add/remove products very easily.
The ability to quickly pass through large amounts of usage data for our clients is allowing us to perform billing in a time-effective manner. Once usage data is loaded, a few clicks and all of the invoices for our client base can be generated. Invoices are clean and detailed which help us maintain a good customer experience even with our somewhat complex billing model. The reporting is extremely helpful in calculating the end of month commissions, recognizing and deferring revenue, and overall bookkeeping.
Note taking can be a hassle, when writing notes there is not a separate tab, or dedicated area which allows for multiple users to leave notes for future users, or administrators to reference regarding actions made to the account, users must search per line item to view notes, or go to a different view to see all notes which is still per line item as you toggle through the notes
If the client has been with the product for several months or years it is a lot of notes you have to reference through which hurts productivity and creates longer calls. A huge con is when you are canceling out a user account, or if you are changing a recurring date if the user clicks the back button after the tasks completes refreshing the webpage to reflect the new dates, the new changes will go undone and revert back to the original data as if no changes were made resulting in user error. The client continues to be billed and discounts continue to apply.
The CRM needs to fix this to prompt "Do you want to undo discount/date change/cancellation?" if the back button is clicked to eliminate user error based on the software limitations. Features which can be customized to automatically perform after actions are done on an account need a function to allow for agents to resend emails if the user did not get them. If automatic emails go to users canceling and they did not get it you have to restart the product then cancel it again to have another automatic email sent to the client/customer or manually send an email. For refunds, if the automatic email did not go out you have to manually send out the email which is time-consuming allocating to another agent or for the current agent. There is a need for an upgrade which allows that after an automatic email has been sent a button will appear which says "resend cancellation" "resend refund" this should also be true if the user inputted the email wrong and it was only noticed by agent after the automatic email was sent and the agent needs to update the email for the client/customer to be able to receive the email at the correct address.
User Interface - Zuora's UI is still a weak point, however, this is negated through the use of its API's. Zuora has done a lot of work in releasing new products to limit its UI experience and the addition of Orders allows for more functionality to reduce the UI issue.
Complex system - This is both a pro and a con, but in this instance, it is a con because we may not have taken the time to truly understand the implications of all the options that were available. the Flexibility is great however if you do not take the time to understand the product and what problem you are trying to solve, you can make life difficult for yourself later down the track. Take the time to map out your approach end to end and ensure your assumptions at the start are robust.
Reporting - reporting is weak as such we have moved away to our own reporting data warehouse.
Our business is now, more than ever, focused on our core business rather than homegrown support tools for quoting, contracts, billing, invoicing, payments and the rest of the subscription economy. We evaluated other solutions and found this the best and most viable solution given the strong ties to Salesforce and it's integration. Zuora works, and it works well.
I had 20+ years of accounting experience before taking on the revenue role. I had several things to [learn] but was able to easily master the software in a matter of weeks. Zuora is our preferred billing platform that we currently use - very efficient and much more automated than our other platform/process.
There have only been a few days/instances in the past 2.5 years of using zuora that I, personally have had issues or been notified of issues relating to Zuora.
Zuora does a superb job for all the tasks I use it for. Billing - it is trustworthy and accurate. Customer data- it holds it and keeps past records for even cancelled accounts, and subscription builds - it has the ability to make very difficult subscriptions seem easy.
A support request is emailed to their support team, then an automated response is sent to you in a couple hours saying "Hey, someone will take a look at your support request soon". Then somewhere around 12-18 hours later, an actual support member responds with "Have you checked out our tutorials? Here's one that sounds like it might help you". I don't want a tutorial given to me that I've already read through that only exists because of the terrible user design of Zuora's user interface
I think Zuora did a great job. However, they could have provided more guidance on how to deal with out Payment Gateway and Processor provider, as well as guidance around providing a Mobile Responsive experience for sites using the Zuora HPM.
In its focused area of subscription management, Zuora does well against competitors. There are some aspects of the tool that appear to attempt to be more "platform" oriented, but fall off quickly. NetSuite and SFDC are not reporting tools, but they look great when compared to Zuora in this regard. Zuora has scripting capabilities thru REST and SOAP (deprecated), but I have found it to be confusing and not particularly useful; much of the documentation and KB seems out-of-date or just plain wrong.
