Today, many companies offer users a free account at first while encouraging them to later switch to a paid membership. This is known as the freemium model, and many notable companies like Spotify, MailChimp, and Google rely on it to drive growth.
For the freemium model to be effective, it needs to be backed up by a strong customer journey. This is true for any business model, in fact: even if your company uses a more traditional pricing structure, there are still key upsell milestones along the customer journey. A customer might purchase additional products, for example, or upgrade to a higher service tier.
From a technical and staffing standpoint, these milestones require a lot of coordination. Once the sales team closes the deal, they have to update the CRM. From there, billing information must also be updated in your accounting program or ERP. And that’s all before the new products or services can be made digitally available to the customer.
Because there are so many steps to orchestrate, the process can take a lot of time. And making a customer wait to enjoy their new purchase is never good. It can make them feel buyer’s remorse, disrupt their relationship with your brand, and even impact retention. Wouldn’t it be great if you could unlock digital products faster, without placing a greater burden on your sales, support, and accounting teams?
By tying your apps together into cohesive, end-to-end workflows, intelligent automation can do just that. It can make your customer milestones smoother and more enjoyable for everyone involved. Here’s how the world’s #1 collaboration platform unlocks paid features automatically, as soon as invoices process—no manual work or coding required!
Who? The world’s #1 enterprise collaboration software is used by thousands of businesses worldwide to send messages, share files, host conference calls, and more.
What are they doing with Workato? Closing the gap between finance and customer success by automatically unlocking paid features.
The Challenge: As a rapidly growing SaaS company, the #1 collaboration platform needed to streamline the processes of onboarding new sign-ups and unlocking paid features. When a user starts paying for additional features or users, those features should ideally become available as soon as their payment processes. But because user data is stored in their internal app and financial information lives in Workday Financials, it was challenging to unlock features in real-time.
The Solution: As invoices are processed in Workday Financials, Workato automatically sends the information to the company’s custom app so that users get instant access to newly purchased features.
The Results:
- Enabled a staff of three business systems staff to adequately support massive organizational growth—from 2 million users to 9 million in just nine months!
- Workato processes 5 million transactions per hour that would otherwise be handled manually
Updating User Information As Invoices Process in Workday
Because the company was growing so quickly, they had to orchestrate customer transitions—like onboarding and upgrades—seamlessly and at scale. Ideally, they want to give users instant access to premium features as soon as their payment processes.
This was difficult because it requires coordination between Workday Financials (their ERP, where invoices are created and stored) and an internal app that houses user information. Syncing data between the two apps and unlocking features in real-time was impossible to do manually—especially at scale.
As a solution, the company turned to Workato’s intelligent automation platform.
Workato automatically sends user information to the company’s custom app as invoices process in Workday. Features are then unlocked automatically, giving users instant access to their new purchases and freeing the sales and support teams up to focus on more pressing tasks.
