Renewal Management Complexities and How CSPs can deal with it effectively

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Renewal management is critical and complex for Microsoft Partners and businesses with recurring revenue. Most businesses realize the benefits of recurring revenue only after the first or second year of renewal because of the cost of sales and marketing.

 

Dealing with customers and billing relationship issues usually brings psychological complexity. When dealing with New Commerce Experience (NCE) clients, this challenge becomes even more complex. The administration of the renewal process is quite a task consisting of several moving parts—from keeping subscriptions on track to provisioning the correct subscriptions to outgoing renewal reminders to using it as an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell.

In this blog, we will explore the intricacies of renewal management, outline best practices, and explain how Work 365 facilitates it.

Legacy vs. NCE: Looking at the Many Changes

In August 2021, Microsoft introduced the new commerce experience (NCE) to provide enhanced capabilities and increased flexibility for partners when purchasing and managing products. While many partners continue to purchase license-based services in the legacy way, NCE brought many new changes. The top changes include:

• Modifications in commitment, such as monthly vs. annual vs. multi-year, allow customers to choose a subscription that best fits their needs.
• The introduction of term-based pricing enables different pricing for annual and monthly commitments.
• Price increases for certain SKUs, with prices for some commercial plans.
• Promotions on how partners discount monthly SKUs needed to be done as Microsoft began incentivizing partners to move to NCE.
• Several currency changes, such as consistent global pricing for Microsoft products, CSP pricelists changing to USD, semi-annual exchange rate calculation for local currencies, and more.

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Guidelines for Efficient Renewal Management

To design an effective renewal process, you must start backward by picking a timeline and understanding the considerations required to decide on that window. When this is done, you can include the duration of the renewal process that works best for your organization. Whether it is 30 days or 60 days, please include that.

Leading with data is crucial in designing a successful renewal management process. This means considering who you are renewing and what products you are renewing. By determining the amount of data you have on customers, products, and prices, you can create a more effective renewal strategy.

Designing outreach and messaging is also essential to getting customers to renew. Creating a cadence and communication strategy will help you decide how to communicate renewals to your customers and what mediums work best for them. Here are some questions that impact renewals, the customer experience, and effectiveness:

1. 1. Who is doing the outreach? Is it the sales team, billing, or customer success? Do you treat renewals as opportunities? 
   2. How are you positioning the message? Are the contracts in spirit set up for Auto-renew, and can you use the renewal process for confirmations? 
   3. Be transparent and clear in the estimate. For example, showing a discount on a line item or across the invoices impacts the perception and conversation and reduces friction.

How Work 365 helps manage renewals and NCE Complexities

The rest of the blog highlights how Work 365 helps manage and design the renewal process. Here is a sample renewal timeline: We’ve picked T- 37 days to include preparation and accommodate any price changes or promotions.

	Identify subscriptions that need to be renewed: With Work 365, you can identify subscriptions and pertinent renewal information, such as the Commitment End Date, underlying Microsoft Product, and Annual Contract Value.
	Notify the team responsible for renewals. Using the Report Scheduler feature, individuals or groups can be notified via email on a set cadence to initiate the renewal process.
	Insights and Data Use PowerBI data and insights to create a strategy for renewals and your exposure, as well as create a winning renewal strategy. Look at the revenue by customer, important renewal date, and the products coming up for renewal.
	Billing History and KYC In most cases, the renewal team must look at past invoices. Work 365 surfaces critical billing, subscription, invoicing, and payment information at an account level. These insights can be coupled with KYC information to manage credit, renewal windows, and pricing.
	Manage Subscription Price Changes The Product Service feature manages price changes from Microsoft, highlights subscriptions without exposure, and sets pricing based on a custom date or renewal. The system can also update the cost price of a subscription based on the Microsoft invoice to accommodate promotions.
	Automate renewal communications Use the low-code, no-code functionality of the platform to automate the renewal process with actionable emails.

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Conclusion

Microsoft NCE brought many changes in how subscriptions are managed and handled. With new modifications around pricing, currency, quantity reduction window and promotions continuously being introduced, CSP partners must review and design effective renewal management processes. In addition, they must build strategies to manage risks and take steps toward improving outreach and crafting new communication strategies.

One way to optimize the renewal management process is to adopt a billing automation solution like Work 365. With this tool, CSP partners can simplify and streamline the entire renewal process, from billing to communication, and ensure that they have the right policies in place for auto-renewal and retention. Work 365 can help CSP partners navigate the complexities of Microsoft NCE and manage renewals effectively, all while improving customer satisfaction.

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