The Subscriptio plug-in is a powerful WordPress tool that can be used to sell subscription products on with WooCommerce. Coupled with the WooCommerce Membership plugin (created by the same developer) it offers a full paid membership site solution.
All of the technological wizardry in the world, however, isn’t going to be worth a customer’s time unless they have some degree of good customer service that they can count on at your site. Fortunately, if you’re using Subscriptio, that customer service can be integrated directly into your site, which can give you a powerful advantage over your competitors.
Give Them Time
One of the reasons the Subscriptio plug-in provides a good solution for selling online subscriptions is that, if set up properly, it can allow subscribers a bit of a warning before they lose their subscription for nonpayment. This has some real customer service benefits.
With WooCommerce subscriptions, when a payment is due but it’s not made, you can set up the plug-in so that it sends out reminders to your customers, rather than just ending their subscription outright. Of course, your ultimate goal is to keep those customers subscribing to your product, not to get rid of them immediately if they happen to be a day or two late.
Subscriptio also offers a suspended subscription feature, along with payment reminders, that can be very handy for customers who simply may have slipped on their payment due to a very good reason. Perhaps they’re out of town, their credit card number may have changed or something else may have happened, but with this WooCommerce subscriptions extension, because their subscription isn’t automatically canceled outright – if you choose to set it up that way – you retain the customer, offering them another chance to renew their subscription before their account is canceled.
Don’t Harass
When you’re trying to keep people interested in a magazine, the last thing you want to do is harass them for payments. Fortunately, Subscriptio allows very sophisticated subscription options, allowing you to send a payment reminder whenever you want, and that may not be that often. For example, if your overdue period runs for a full month, you can set up WooCommerce so that it will only send out reminders once a week, once every two weeks are however long you want the interval between reminders to be.
People don’t like the feeling of being harassed. If they simply forgot to renew their subscription and they’re constantly getting emails – remember, a lot of people will be getting notified of emails on their smart phones when they may be doing something that they don’t want to be distracted from – they may be turned off to your product entirely and decide not to renew.
Flexibility Is Great
Being skillful at customer service requires that you have the ability to think like your customers. If you sell a product that people may only subscribe to intermittently, it’s useful to utilize the WooCommerce subscriptions feature that allows you to suspend, cancel or pause a subscription manually.
Here’s an example. If you published a digital magazine that was geared toward people in premed studies, they may very well want to suspend their subscription during their break from college. If you can set up your customer service so that they can accommodate these requests, WooCommerce subscriptions will certainly give you the flexibility to do that. This allows you to go the extra mile for a customer, potentially getting yourself a lot of loyalty in the process.
These and other customer service related tasks can be handled via the admin subscription area in the Subscriptio plug-in. Once you have it installed on your WordPress site, all you have to do is open it up and tweak the options however you need.
Running subscription websites can be complicated, but WooCommerce makes it easy in terms of the technological requirements. The customer service requirements, however, still come down to good customer experience and being able to tailor your products to your customers is a huge part of that. By combining the technological advantages that WooCommerce offers with some good old-fashioned concern for your customers, you can make certain that they regard your business as a trustworthy, accommodating and professional one that can handle their requests, even if those requests mean occasionally suspending their subscription or getting an extra day or two to renew it on occasion.
As one final bonus, Subscriptio has a lot of filters built into it and a lot of hooks built into it which, if you’re a developer, means that you can take it in new directions and customize it to the needs of your business.
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