CLIENT

CIAL is a part of the global D&B network, working across 43 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean with millions of corporate clients, providing sophisticated business intelligence.

CHALLENGE

CIAL certainly wanted to move to a subscription business, but they recognised that some of their clients wanted to keep access to one off purchases, all inside the same multi-currency system with automated invoicing and granular reporting.

SOLUTION

In the first instance, we kept the dual functionality - subscriptions and ad hoc purchases, with the same high service levels for both. We also proposed and subsequently introduced variable pricing across currencies to encourage migration to subscription, and metered billing to introduce credit facilities with monthly rollovers, all to incentivise users to switch to a subscription model and save money which helps CIAL achieve their business goals without alienating clients that genuinely needed the ability to make individual purchases.

CLIENT FEEDBACK

Billforward has been a game changer for us. Their advanced knowledge of subscription processes, coupled with their willingness to really get under the skin of our business led to them proposing a number of innovations that has added significantly to our bottom line, by driving clients towards a subscription model without depriving them of the facility for one-off purchases.

CIAL D&B CTO, Yoni Cohen

CLIENT

Wifinity is a UK-based ISP specialising in wireless solutions for customers in high density sites, such as student accommodation, military barracks and holiday parks. Because of the transient nature of people living in these sites, billing them requires a high level of flexibility

CHALLENGE

Wifinity has a complex use case, requiring flexibility over subscription length and product selection (connection speed and number of connected devices on each account). Wifinity also wanted the ability to upgrade, downgrade, pause and cancel subscriptions mid period. Naturally, they also wanted the opportunity to extend or reactivate accounts as required.

SOLUTION

The Billforward platform provided this functionality as standard, with granular controls over all of these aspects. It then went further, providing data insight into which products were most popular via its own Salesforce integration, allowing Wifinity to iterate its products optimally.

CLIENT FEEDBACK

Wifinity has experienced rapid growth with Billforward from start-up to industry leader in its specialist area – as we have developed our products and increased specific requirements from our billing, Billforward has been there, even developing new functionality to meet our demands.

Wifinity CTO, Stephen Fine

CLIENT

Happy Family Organics is the market leader in the US for organic baby food, valued at $240m in 2020 and experiencing an 85% increase in sales that year alone. Happy Family Organics’ mission is to give babies their healthiest, happiest beginning by offering parents organic, thoughtfully-made food. They have always stood by their original ethos despite their rapid growth. A big part of their channel strategy has been D2C and Billforward has helped them with this since 2015. They were acquired by Danone in 2013.

CHALLENGE

Happy Family has always seen the value of brand loyalty, and how this can be achieved via subscription. The difficulty they faced was in finding a platform where a subscription could evolve as their child clients also grew, delivering the right baby food at the right price, from birth to 8+ months old.

SOLUTION

This one definitely was not available out of the box – this client had a unique requirement and Billforward created a unique “evolving subscription” solution, using the powerful features of the Billforward “Contracts” module to pre-programme changes into a subscription over time.

Better still, Billforward was able to analyse Happy Family’s existing technology which already included a content management system, eCommerce, payments, business intelligence and fulfilment capability. Billforward’s API first approach meant that it was possible to integrate with all of these components without major changes to the existing stack.

CLIENT FEEDBACK

Happy Family is one of our North America brands, specialising in premium organic foods for children, tailored for age. Before Billforward we didn't have a setup in place - to build our own would be hard and time consuming - there's lots of edge cases - so we needed to identify a specialist.

Billforward were able to offer us the flexibility we needed to build the product that we wanted. They helped us not just in the implementation of the subscription model, but on how our billing architecture should work.

The most important feature is that it is API first, and then the ability to have a subscription that changes over the course of the lifetime of our consumer. Billforward is really seen as partners, not just a technical team, and they were able to help us solve so many problems and took real ownership.

The level of service was the best that we had from any of our partners.

Russell Lincoln, Global Head of Direct to Consumer, Danone Early Life Nutrition

CLIENT

Buddybuild started as a small firm in Vancouver in 2015, providing a SaaS product that allows developers to continuously integrate and debug applications as they build them, through GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab. The company exited to Apple Inc in 2018.

CHALLENGE

The Buddybuild team wanted to sell their product in tiers, varying with usage and encourage upgrades through the tiers. It was therefore important that clients were able to select a tier, and that the billing platform was configured to record each customer’s usage and then charge them if they exceeded their allowance or, alternatively, upgrade them to a higher tier.

SOLUTION

Billforward’s usage based (metered) billing solution perfectly fitted the Buddybuild use case. By counting the number of customer pull requests and flowing this information directly into Billforward using the open API, Buddybuild was able to automate the process for charging its customers overage, as well as being able to target customers who would be better suited to the higher capacity tier.

CLIENT BENEFITS

Billforward allowed our customers to upgrade their account via a Customer Portal, and generated automated customer notification. Bottom line, they dramatically increased MRR. At the same time, by automating overage charging, Billforward reduced manual tasks for our finance team.

CLIENT FEEDBACK

Billforward allowed our customers to upgrade their account via a Customer Portal, and generated automated customer notification. Bottom line, they dramatically increased MRR. At the same time, by automating overage charging, Billforward reduced manual tasks for our finance team.

Adam Smythe, Finance Manager