A leading finance technology firm offers a data-driven content marketing platform, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to automate the searching and curation of content for newsletters, websites, and social media. While the company has entered an exciting growth phase, it had to conquer several operational and finance-related challenges to get there.

First and foremost, the company needed a way to streamline its customer success operations to focus its support resources on top-tier, paying customers. The finance leader’s services are popular with many businesses, but the downside of being popular is having a sizable support queue containing many help requests, including a significant number coming from non-paying accounts at free trial status. Customer success was unaware of which customers were paying, client billing schedules, and intervals. This weighed on finance, which had to always research these issues and report back.

The company also had operational challenges with data flows between its application (like many SaaS applications, it requires customers to cancel their accounts within the application itself to avoid verification issues), its payment processing software/billing management system Stripe, and its CRM, Salesforce. The lack of integrations between systems led to several operational issues. For example, the company experienced difficulty in reconciling bookings from its CRM vs. revenue from billings stored in the company’s accounting systems (integrated with Stripe). The company needed this information to track collection status on commissions - an especially slow and painstaking process. The lack of integrations also prevented the company from forecasting revenues by knowing which accounts were scheduled to churn at the end of their subscription term - an incredibly useful tool for a SaaS business.

The company decided to search for a solution that would provide the extended functionality it needed to drill down into account-level segmentation, commission calculations, and customer retention stats while being user-friendly enough to adopt by its various business users. It would be important to have an easy-to-use solution for non-technical team members to dive into the inner workings of a Stripe-to-Salesforce integration to fine-tune it.

By using Tray.ai’s flexible Universal Automation Cloud, the company was able to sync Stripe and Salesforce to ensure the company could constantly, and automatically, update all customer records, particularly for payment status, as well as to assist marketing and sales ops in lead recording and conversions to paying customers.

“What we were looking to do was increase efficiencies in our organization to free up bandwidth for things like saving at-risk accounts. You need good data to be effective there,” explains the VP. “We needed data integrity, which resulted from the centralization of information.”

The company was able to realize many powerful benefits from working with Tray. For instance, by integrating Stripe with Salesforce to provide visibility and sorting for paid accounts vs. free accounts, the company was able to intelligently deploy its valuable support resources to ensure its most valuable customers remained happy. This also translated into tremendous time savings for sales ops in calculating commissions, approximately 10 hours per month as well as about three additional hours per month dealing with billing issues.

In addition, by syncing its customer retention records from Stripe into Salesforce, it was not only better positioned to proactively retain more customers, but also to form baseline estimates for churn against its monthly revenue. With this new degree of visibility and automation, the company was much better positioned to allocate its resources towards growth initiatives, including but not limited to the execution of the launch of the company’s freemium offering. In addition the VP states that “Tray.ai gave me efficiency because of the timeliness of the info I could provide, and freed up resources in customer success, sales and marketing, and finance.”