How Chargebee helped Trail Reduce Time Spent on Subscription Management by 80%

The Problem

Trail’s workflow was heavily dependent on an outbound sales-driven model, requiring the customer success team to handle onboarding of customers and collections. The CS team was spending close to 20 hours/month on just billing operations - primarily on manually chasing customers to collect payment details after onboarding and still losing out on potential revenue.

Managing ongoing subscriptions and setting up billing was a completely manual and error-prone process. This led to a confusing experience for customers, leading to a poor introduction to an otherwise fantastic product.

The Solution

After evaluating other players in the space, Trail chose Chargebee as their preferred partner for subscription management and automated billing for:

• the ability to automate subscription workflows and recover lost revenue,

• an optimized billing experience, so more time could be spent on onboarding,

• its support for payment gateways and methods such as GoCardless for direct debit,

• it’s reputation in the market

The Pay-off

While most of Trail’s issues tied back to potentially losing out on a lot of revenue, Trail’s usage of Chargebee resulted in more than simply recovering lost revenue. They were able to:

• Close a sale much faster. The checkout flow integrated the signup process and payment collection to reduce drop-offs

• Get a complete view into different subscription states, with the ability to configure special deals or rates for different customers

• Achieve visibility into accurate real-time business metrics that they care about. Before Chargebee, Trail had to work out the MRR details from their accounting system, which often wasn’t up-to-date. There was a significant difference in the expected revenue and actual revenue.

We implemented Chargebee at a point when we were experiencing massive growth and this (growth) wouldn't have been possible without Chargebee.

Nick Allen, Product Manager, Trail