What is subscription management?
Do you want to know what subscription management is all about?
Everybody’s talking about it, but what is it? Let’s dive a little bit deeper into what it actually is…
The other day I talked to a girl. Her name is Amira, and she was sitting at the vet with her dog, and I called her to ask about the subscription management feature that she was using through her bank, and she said yes, I could ask her some questions. And then I asked, well, ‘what do you think of the subscription management feature that you’re using through your bank?‘ . And she was like ‘do you really want to know?‘
And I said ‘yes…‘ and there was this long awkward pause, and then she said ‘I think it’s amazing! It’s the first time ever that I’ve seen all my different subscriptions in one place. And the first time that I saw it I immediately went and cancelled three subscriptions all at once.’ So it’s actually for people like Amira that we’ve made Subaio’s subscription management platform.
Because Amira is not alone. Far from it. There are so many people out there that are struggling with their recurring payments and their subscriptions.
And just to give you a few examples like, of course, we know the streaming services, like Netflix, we know the music services like Spotify, but there are so many other things coming in subscriptions as well. That means that suddenly you can get a car from Volvo as a subscription. You can get t-shirts from H&M, you can get shoes from Nike on a subscription as well. The list just goes on and on. So it’s a huge volume of things that these users are struggling with when it comes to understanding their recurring payments and their subscriptions.
And actually 60 of all of these different subscriptions are not being used or have totally been forgotten. So there’s a huge issue for this in the user’s perspective: they need to be able to understand this space better and need to be able to also get out of subscriptions that they no longer need, and that’s where Subaio comes in.
So what Subaio basically does is three things:
So we give the user an overview of all the different subscriptions and recurring payments. We cancel unwanted subscriptions on the behalf of the end user and thirdly we notify them about any changes to their subscriptions as well.
If we take the first one, the overview, what the user normally sees is really just this – we’ve tried to illustrate chaos, right – so that means that when they see their bank statement they don’t see exactly what it is that they’re paying on a recurring basis, they don’t see the logos of the companies that they’re buying from, they don’t see the names either. So that means what Subaio does, is that we actually go in, and we enrich all that data. So we show the logos, we show the name of the recurring payment and we show them all in an overview. So that means that the user is actually able to go in one simple interface and see all the things that they’re paying for on a regular basis.
So that’s the first part of what we do. If we go a step further then of course there’s the cancellation part. So how do you get out of these different subscriptions?
What a user normally does, is that you pick up the phone and then you just dial the number, and then you call and then you can wait in line forever for somebody from customer service to actually pick up and take your call, right? Some users also send email, or a snail mail. Then there’s also users that go online and then try to get out of these subscriptions on the website. But that can also prove to be very difficult, because where is the cancellation button? Sometimes it’s hidden. We actually have a name for that, it’s called ‘dark patterns’.
It’s going to be more and more difficult to get out of these different subscriptions, and they’re sending you back and forth from different screens and then suddenly you just give up.
And that’s where Subaio comes in, when it comes to cancelling these subscriptions as well.
Because what we do in the interface that the user is seeing within their own banking environment is a button they can press. Where we are the ones doing all of the hard work. Subaio is the one cancelling all these different subscriptions on behalf of the end user.
The last thing that we do is around notifications. So that means that when the user is signing up for a subscription, we notify them. If the user suddenly is getting or is paying more for a certain subscription, we notify them. Every time there’s a change in these different recurring payments we go in and we notify the user about these changes, so we’re constantly monitoring their different recurring payments and letting them know, if there’s changes to that.
This system with the overview, with the cancellation, and also the notifications on getting out of subscriptions and notifying them about these changes is used by thousands of users already.
