Team eCommerce Next interviewed Kelly Knutson, Head of E-Commerce Sales from Chargebee to get more insights on Brightback acquisition. Following is our interview with him:
Can you start by telling us about this acquisition and if there were any factors that led to Chargebee’s interest in Brightback?
As the subscription economy evolved through the pandemic, customer retention has also transitioned from a customer stickiness metric to a revenue growth lever. Brightback’s churn deflection and predictive churn diagnosis help subscription businesses unlock their full revenue potential, optimize for great customer experiences as they uncover more opportunities for value maximization.
It seamlessly ties into Chargebee’s aim of being a full-stack revenue management partner for all our customers. Together, we have already enabled some of the fastest-growing startups, including Hopin, TouchNote, and ScreenCloud, to launch and evolve high-performance retention flows quickly.
How does this acquisition impact the larger subscription community?
Our acquisition of Brightback will give our customers the convenience of managing their entire subscription lifecycle – from billing to retention – all through one space. By consolidating best-in-class solutions in the market under one umbrella, we will look to empower more businesses to launch robust subscription offerings, grow LTV, reduce churn, and amass customer intelligence.
Brightback’s personalized churn deflection, offer-based retargeting, and retention capabilities coupled with Chargebee’s specialized subscription growth, billing, and analytics have paved the way for a state-of-the-art revenue management and early intervention stack for subscription-led businesses of all sizes.
Does this acquisition support any industry trends that are applicable to the eCommerce community?
According to a Gartner estimation, by 2023, 75% of all DTC companies will launch a subscription service. While this underscores the growing impetus to build and launch subscription business models, heightened competition for the same customer share has greatly amplified the role of effective customer retention as a competitive advantage.
With the Brightback acquisition, Chargebee is poised to grow its foothold across the D2C sector and build its identity as a full-stack revenue management and growth partner for subscription eCommerce businesses.
Now, can you tell us about the features that Brightback brings to Chargebee’s platform?
Brightback offers automated solutions to increase customer retention and lifetime value by reducing on average 23% of online cancellations, retaining free trials, and surfacing benchmarked intelligence. With the Chargebee integration, merchants can pull in subscriber data to seamlessly set up automated workflows and machine learning to test, target, and personalize customer experiences to retain more users and optimize revenue.
Is there anything else you’d like to add to the interview?
As market demand for subscription billing services grows, our goal is to be a trusted, reliable and comprehensive solution that enables customer retention best practices for our global customer base. Even as Brightback transitions into the Chargebee family, it will continue to integrate with in-house and third-party subscription management systems to support existing and future customers in their customer retention journeys.
