Audiense Partners With Recurly to Support Unlimited Growth
Overview
Twitter’s motto is “Join the conversation.” For a marketer, joining the conversation means knowing what your followers and fans are saying about you in the “Twitterverse,” how your Twitter marketing campaigns are doing overall, and the specific ways you can improve your followers’ engagement with your brand.
Audiense is a SaaS-based Twitter campaign management platform that helps global brands such as Universal Music, DigitasLBi, Visa and Levi’s do just that. Using Audiense, brands can identify key influencers, analyze what their interests are, target outbound Twitter marketing campaigns, optimize audience engagement, and track campaign results. An official Twitter Partner, Audiense is based in London and has offices in San Francisco, CA and Cordoba, Spain.
Worth the Wait
With more than 10,000 customers in over 70 countries, Audiense had experienced rapid growth over a very short time period since being founded in 2011. As a SaaS-based business, providing a great platform and customer experience was key to the business’ ongoing growth and success.
At the time, Audiense offered all customers the option to choose from any number of plans, including custom plans. While this variety and flexibility was great for their customers, it made invoicing and tracking a real challenge for the Audiense Operations team — a full-time team who were responsible for accurately billing customers and confirming payments, along with all the other critical and sometimes convoluted tasks that come with managing your own invoicing and billing.
Even before it began doing business in the UK, Recurly was on the radar of Audiense's Operations Director, Carlos Serra, who had done his research and knew that Recurly was an ideal solution to power Audiense’s subscription billing business. Since Recurly was not available and there was no equivalent solution that would fit their needs, Audiense built their own system tied to PayPal, which proved to be no small task.
When Recurly finally became available, Audiense was ecstatic. They knew that their subscription billing headaches would be solved and that they had a secure and scalable solution which would grow with them and fit long-term.
You can tell that Recurly is very passionate about what they do and are very open to engaging with their customers, accepting feedback and building on it. These were crucial things for us.
Choosing a Strategic Partner
Audiense’s interest in Recurly wasn’t purely tactical. As a software business focused on innovating, Audiense was also looking for a company with the same mindset — a strategic partner that would learn and grow with them.
Charles Wedderburn, Audiense’s Financial Controller recalls, “When you start evaluating a company and how they talk about themselves and what they want to offer their customers, you get a sense of what they’ll be like to work with. You can tell that Recurly is very passionate about what they do and are very open to engaging with their customers, accepting feedback and building on it. These were crucial things for us.”
It’s All About Growth — and Usability
Audiense has thousands of customers on a whole range of price plans. “This would be simply unmanageable without a solution like Recurly’s,” says Wedderburn. With Recurly, Audiense can provide a better customer experience and handle thousands of customers without a large administrative burden. Indeed, they have been able to maintain the same team size even as their customer base has grown exponentially. They can easily sign up hundreds of new customers and ensure their accounts are set up in a very short period of time. And they never have to worry about the customer not being invoiced correctly.
Along with growth, which every company is looking for, is usability. “Recurly is really easy to use,” says Wedderburn. Despite having a fairly complex implementation, because of all the custom plans they offered, it was easy to deploy, even though the person responsible was admittedly a “non-techie.” “Recurly talks to the back-end nicely,” they report.
Recurly listens to our needs and works with us to optimize where we can, create efficiencies, and improve our customers' experience.
Listening to the Customer’s Needs
Recurly also gives Audiense a competitive advantage in the market. While growth obviously relies primarily on volume, it also relies on being intelligent in how you handle your data and invoice your customers. “Recurly listens to our needs and works with us to optimize where we can, create efficiencies, and improve our customers’ experience,” Wedderburn states. “Recurly has the expertise we need, but at the same time, they are always willing to hear our suggestions.”
Metrics That Matter
Wedderburn says that Recurly saves them “a million and a half pounds a year”—but he’s only kidding. What Recurly does save them can better be measured in man-power resources, such as not having to hire extra staff just to manage their invoicing and billing. “Timeliness, accuracy and accessibility of customer data are the key to us keeping a small but effective team,” says Wedderburn. With Recurly as their partner, and with our expertise powering their billing, Audiense can concentrate on what they do best: managing and optimizing their customers’ Twitter campaigns, helping them to grow their businesses.
Download the Case Study: Audiense
