Cerillion Blog

Customers want a centralised content hub to help manage and pay for all their subscriptions – and they want their mobile or broadband provider to run it. Would this be a good move for telcos, and would streamers be the bigger winners?

Consumer psychology won’t let you brainwash customers into becoming loyal consumers, but it offers important lessons for subscription companies in designing their products and customer experience. We take a deep dive into the psychology of subscriptions, and try to separate the useful hacks from the useless hokum.

The COVID pandemic has exposed the challenges that the telecoms industry was already facing. Rupali Srivastava explores the issues the crisis has highlighted, and how telcos can insulate themselves from further troubles.

CSPs continue to struggle against OTT services, who are growing rapidly on the back of telco infrastructure. Are they an existential threat, or is there common ground to be had?

More than a minor annoyance, payment declines are enough to halt a significant number of your online sales in their tracks. What can merchants do to protect themselves from the effects of these errors and safeguard their revenues, particularly when it comes to subscriptions?

Moving your business to usage-based billing is not without its perils – from how you implement it in your subscription plans, to whether your customers take the change kindly. Here are five common challenges that every business must overcome to shift successfully to a usage-based pricing model.

Retail was facing a reckoning – and then the pandemic struck. As businesses pivot their strategies to online business models, how are they making use of subscriptions to reinvigorate their offerings?

More and more SaaS companies are turning to usage-based billing models to entice uncertain new customers with commitment-free offerings. But can these companies handle the uncertain revenue that this entails?

Subscriptions are high on the agenda of the World Economic Forum, as part of their strategy for a Great Reset of global capitalism. How will subscriptions be integral to a circular economy? And will not owning anything really make everyone happy?

As the subscriptions industry proves its resilience to the shocks of 2020, we look ahead to what big trends we think are in store for businesses in 2021, a year of consolidation and transformation.

There is a common misconception that recurring billing and recurring payments are one and the same thing – a misunderstanding that can have profound implications on the likelihood of subscription success. Dominic Smith runs through the key differences between billing and payments, and explains why companies embarking on a subscription model need to look carefully at their recurring billing needs to avoid a Winter of Discontent.

Making the switch from product sales to subscription services comes with the inherent risk of alienating your existing customer base. How can you encourage your customers to become subscribers, rather than one-off buyers? And what does “swallowing the fish” have to do with it?

Now more than ever, it’s critical for subscription businesses to automate billing processes. How does Cerillion’s assisted implementation service ensure that a customer’s bespoke charging and billing platform is ready for launch in as little as three weeks? We break down the onboarding process from start to finish in simple terms.

In the final of our three-part healthcare series, we take a look at how subscription teleconferencing applications across the world are bringing consultations out of the surgery.

Large service providers are relying on smaller dealers and distributors to do the heavy lifting of product or service sales. How does a subscription billing system like Cerillion Skyline create a unified sales repository for these various resellers?

Integrations are essential to guaranteeing that customer data remains synced between your various software applications. These integrations come in many forms, with their own merits and drawbacks – what are the differences between these?

With the world facing the biggest healthcare crisis this century, subscription telehealth services are being deployed at an unprecedented rate, using mobile apps to deliver medical care outside the surgery. What are the pros and cons of telehealth treatments – and who foots the bill?

Facing falling ad revenues, Twitter is looking at introducing a premium subscription option to its platform. How viable is a subscription social network? And what can we learn from previous attempts at such a model?

With Netflix announcing their decision to close the accounts of inactive customers, should other subscription businesses reconsider how they deal with “zombie accounts” who pay their fees but don’t engage with a service? Is the decision a strictly moral choice, or is there a financial benefit behind it too?

We cast our minds back to the beginning of the year, once again, and to the five predictions that Cerillion made for the biggest trends for the subscription industry in 2020; how have recent developments treated these expectations over half a year later?

Businesses across all industries are identifying new and increasingly innovative sources of revenue, thanks to the ever-growing opportunities presented by the Internet of Things (IoT). How can subscription businesses capitalise on the potential of embedded sensor-based technology?

Millennials and Generation Z account for a significant majority of users of subscription services. As their share of the public spend increases, how can businesses ensure their offerings meet the expectations of this diverse, difficult audience?

The latest release of Cerillion Skyline, our subscription billing platform, introduces powerful balance management features, extending the monetisation capabilities of your usage-based services with the addition of flexible unit and money-based allowances.

The goal of any major software project should be to solve a business problem or streamline a business process in the most cost-effective way. So, when deciding on mission-critical software for your business operations, what are the relative merits of building in-house versus buying an off-the-shelf solution?

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to bite into everyday lives, consumption habits have been massively upended by closures and social distancing measures. We’ve previously covered how the telecoms world is faring amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, but how are the many subscription services responding in this time of crisis, and what lessons are there in these cases?

Cerillion is a couple of weeks into remote working, with every department striving to ensure that it’s business as usual. Adam Hughes spoke with Amit McCann, Delivery Director at Cerillion, to see what effect the coronavirus is having on the company’s projects.

Once the standard-bearers of subscriptions, print newspaper revenues are increasingly under threat in an ever more competitive market of 24-hour and online news. With papers betting big on digital subscriptions to keep the presses running, what strategies are the biggest publications adopting to avoid becoming tomorrow’s fish and chip paper?

Despite all the focus on the business dividends, it’s the consumer who is the ultimate beneficiary of the subscription billing model. While subscriptions have been around for decades, the unprecedented level of service control now offered has not. But beyond the mere convenience, what are the biggest benefits of subscriptions for customers?

For all the success stories of the booming subscription industry, we cannot forget there are some high-profile failures of the model too. MoviePass, the cinema ticket subscription service, was once the stuff that dreams are made of; now it’s a business for ants. Adam Hughes performs the post-mortem on this now-bankrupt cinema subscription service to see what their mistakes could mean for other subscription businesses.

As we usher in a new decade for the subscription industry, there is no doubt that businesses in the space will find more ways to engage customers, create new revenue streams and innovate with unique approaches. Shashank Venkat looks into the trends that mark the beginnings of a period where the subscription model is poised to become the default for most businesses.

The subscription model is all about putting subscribers first and having a ‘grace period’ for payments and renewals is another way to show customers that your subscription business cares about them. In fact, Apple has recently rolled out this feature for App Store subscriptions highlighting its significance.

As cloud platforms become ubiquitous, iPaaS solutions are enabling businesses to simplify data integration, streamline integration flows, improve efficiency and reduce costs. Cerillion Skyline helps you maximise the capabilities present within iPaaS platforms.

The iPhone may be Apple’s biggest talking point, but another less spoken about business segment is slowly becoming a cash cow for the company. Shashank Venkat investigates Apple’s growing services business.

The healthcare sector is perfectly poised for subscriptions, and there is plenty of room for growth among the different areas of the industry. Faisal Hasan examines the reasons why subscriptions are a natural fit for the healthcare industry and looks at some successful examples.

In line with the EU’s vision for a digital single market, new digital media portability rules have come into force from this month. The regulation mandates that paid online content providers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video must offer cross-border portability to their subscribers. Shashank Venkat presents the details.

There seems to be a growing perception that if software is offered through the cloud it comes with no cost or at a very low cost. Richard Doughty, Business Development Director at Cerillion, debunks this myth in an interview with Shashank Venkat.

Internet giants such as Netflix, Facebook and Google, among others, have formed an unlikely coalition to go all out against the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed repeal of existing net neutrality provisions. Should subscribers to digital streaming services start to worry? Shashank Venkat finds out.

The media and entertainment industry is fraught with multiple challenges. Declining sales, low advertising revenues, changing consumer preferences and digital transformation are all posing questions for the industry. So, what’s the road ahead? Shashank Venkat explores.