How To Simplify Retail Admin with Subscription Management Solutions
Streamlining Operations: How Subscription Management Solutions Ease Retailers’ Administrative Burdens
Retailers face a unique combination of challenges. They must perform despite operating in one of the most competitive industries, and customer demand that can shift day-by-day. Stakeholders need some sense of stability, and subscription-based models offer that, by creating revenue potential while easing administrative burdens. This article discusses the top retail administrative burdens and how a subscription management solution brings relief while boosting growth and competitiveness. In this article:
- Complex Inventory Management
- Inefficient Billing Processes
- Customer Management Challenges
- Regulatory Compliance
- Reporting and Analytics
- Difficulty in Scaling Operations
- How Subscription Management Solutions Can Solve These Burdens
Let’s face it – between the competition, economic instability, and constantly shifting customer demand, retail is one of the most challenging industries out there.
That’s why retail businesses operating on a subscription model, are always looking for ways to cut operational costs while boosting customer experience and loyalty, especially when it comes to admin.
The best retail administration is important because if it’s inefficient, it will cause a chain reaction in everything else in operations. And the end result?
Best-case scenario? Stifled growth.
Worst-case scenario? Competitors close in, costly mistakes are made, and the business potentially closes.
No one wants either of those scenarios. So what’s the picture like?
What are the Top Administrative Burdens?
If you asked anyone working in retail admin what their biggest challenges are, they’d probably ask “How long have you got?”.
And when your retail business has a subscription model, it can magnify the burden on your admin team.
But these are the ones we hear about the most:
1. Complex Inventory Management
Cause: Manual tracking methods and lack of real-time data.
Anyone who worked inventory through the pandemic knows how everything can change at the drop of a hat.
It’s difficult to continually maintain accurate stock levels across various sales channels (online, brick and mortar), throughout different seasons, launches, new competitors, and keeping up with trends.
That’s why both overstocking and stock shortages are fairly common, and both are costly because there are lost sales opportunities, higher storage and depreciation costs, and disappointed customers turning to competitors.
2. Inefficient Billing Processes
Cause: Reliance on outdated systems and manual data entry.
We’re shivering just thinking about it. Thousands of hours are wasted thanks to handling recurring billing, invoicing, and payment processing manually.
And the more the transactions, the more errors are likely. According to findings by Ascend, almost 40% of manually processed invoices have errors in them. And errors are costly- each paper invoice error costs a business around $53 to fix.
And it snowballs. When there are errors, that means customer disputes, late payments, and worst of all – damaging customer trust.
Imagine the overall costs if the retail admin team is processing hundreds or thousands of invoices a week or month.
3. Customer Management Challenges
Causes: Fragmented data and lack of automation and analysis.
With growth comes complexity in managing all your customer information and the subscriptions you have.
It’s exhausting to manually keep customer records up-to-date. But if they’re out of date, you risk inefficient communication as well as problems with service and product delivery.
When the customer experience is subpar, sales opportunities are missed. Customers get frustrated. And churn can go through the roof, no matter how hard the admin team is working.
4. Regulatory Compliance
Cause: Evolving regulations and manual compliance processes.
It’s a nightmare to have to ensure compliance to regulations and guidelines with data protection, financial reporting, and buying/selling across regions, countries and continents.
No matter how efficient a team, it’s nearly impossible (and very expensive) to keep up.
But it’s costly not to. Non-compliance means hefty fines, legal problems, and damage to your reputation.
5. Reporting and Analytics
Cause: Disparate data sources and lack of integrated analytics tools.
Good forecasts are absolutely essential to a retail business. Leveraging business data to help decision-makers is one of the most important ingredients to competitiveness.
When siloed data is stuck in manual and legacy systems, you can’t get the actionable insights you need about your business performance or customer behavior.
That means you can’t plan. You miss opportunities for growth in your base and efficiency in your operations. You can’t figure out how to capitalize on trends or get an advantage over your competition. And you won’t be able to tailor your offerings to meet collective and individual customer needs.
6. Difficulty in Scaling Operations
Cause: Manual processes that do not scale efficiently with business growth.
Everyone wants their business to grow. But it adds another layer of challenges for those manual processes.
It’s hard to avoid bottlenecks once orders and/or the customer base. Delays in processing orders and subscriptions. Missing out on market opportunities. Missing customer demands. It all, painfully and ironically, damages the very growth you’re building.
All of these are serious problems. They cost your business money, chase customers away, and wreak havoc on your brand.
Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can do to turn things around.
7. How Subscription Management Solutions Can Solve These Burdens
We’re going to cut to the chase because we see this all the time. There’s one umbrella for all the subscription management solutions that can turn things around for the retail admin team: automation.
Here are all the ways one automation solution works:
- Inventory Management: This ensures reliable, real-time tracking of stock. Automatic restocking (or alerts) minimises the risk of both overstocking or stock shortages. You get better accuracy, lower overheads, and happier customers who get what they need.
- Streamlined Billing and Payment Processing: Cut the time and effort that’s wasted in manual processes. Automation delivers invoicing that’s consistent and accurate. No more manual errors. No more putting out fires. No more delayed payments. You get better cash flow AND as a bonus, your customers enjoy better (and easier!) payment options.
- Centralized Customer Management: When legacy data is centralised in a single system, it’s a strong foundation for efficiency and service quality. Not only can you automate personalised communication, but you personalise the experience of each customer too. Customer relationships get a lot stronger because they’re happier. And upselling and cross-selling customer opportunities are no longer lost.
- Compliance Management: Quite simply, automation keeps track of all the changing guidelines and laws across as many locations as you serve. Everything’s monitored and customer data is secured. No more penalties. No more damage to your reputation or your ability to legally trade. And you build customer trust because of your commitment to secure and ethical practices.
- Reports and Analytics: Untapping the data with automation gives you valuable insights into sales, customer behavior, and operations. That’s how to get the best information for the best decision-making. You’ll know where you can improve, plan, optimise your operations, beat your competitors, and spot the opportunities for growth.
- Scaling: Automation facilitates the growth you want, because when a system is scalable, it doesn’t matter how many new customers or transactions or complexity you have. You’ll always be able to adapt and grow in response to market demands.
When you get to tackle these areas with automation, you and your team will finally overcome all the costly problems that have been plaguing you.
Sounds fantastic, right?
Conclusion
We can all agree- retail’s tough. That’s why you need as many advantages as possible.
It isn’t often that one solution can handle all your retail admin problems. So why not take advantage of it, and knock out your biggest challenges in one go?
When you ease your administrative burdens, you’re finally allowed to focus on what you want to – giving your customers the best products and experience.
Let’s chat further.
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