eSuite, a Year in Review: Top 10 Features Launched in 2017 (Part One)

Wow, where did 2017 go? A year has gone by in the blink of an eye, and the tech industry has seen exciting shifts. Innovation is all around us, and here at MPP Global, we’ve seen several advancements of our own.

The team have worked tirelessly, day and night, weekday and weekend, as we continue to excel as the world’s smartest subscription and billing platform. And what’s more, we’ve just concluded our annual Hackathon in conjunction with Microsoft, where our innovative team of engineers, product owners and marketers capped off the year developing some exciting real technology in a 3-day extravaganza. Without giving anything away, prepare to be wowed when these hacks go into development!

So, without further ado, let’s tally up our top 10 favourite features launched in 2017.

#1 Subscription Holidays: Customer Flexibility to Reduce Churn

A common requirement for customers is the ability to access and manage their subscription, essentially to start, stop or pause it, either for a holiday, or lack of funds to pay for the subscription. Whatever the reason, eSuite now offers a highly configurable interface within eSuite HQ to set up a subscription holiday. When this is active, the client can define which entitlements a customer can retain during that holiday, such as keeping the digital edition and removing the print edition. The key features include:

1. Defining when a customer can use subscription holidays, i.e. must be subscribed for 3 months
2. The period in which a customer can book a holiday, i.e. 11 months of the year
3. The minimum and maximum number of holidays than can be taken during a given period, i.e. 20 days.
4. Other features include; notice periods, subscription expiry extensions and entitlements to suspend.

The benefit of such functionality is offering the customer more control and an additional option other than to cancel. Suspended or paused revenue is better than lost revenue altogether.

#2 Subscription gifting advancements: Offer a Recurring Gift to Friend and Family

On top of our existing gifting feature, we’ve recently added some additional functionality, as well as rolling out support for gifting across our SDK. Advancements include:

• Purchase and redeem subscription gifts via REST API
• A new subscription gift template can be configured to remind a customer their gift is ending, encouraging them to re-subscribe
• An out-of-the-box gifting journey will be added to eSuite SDK along with styling updates and usability improvements. Watch this space in early 2018 for a full feature launch.

#3 Virtual Terminal 2.0: A Better User Experience for MOTO Transactions

We thought it was time that the Virtual Terminal had a face lift! The new interface says goodbye to the lightbox and keeps the journey within the eSuite HQ frame, with the same functions, but giving greater functional control with the aim of speeding up the end-to-end flow. Searching for subscriptions and products is more intuitive, and the adding/editing of payment details is also clearer, making the process much quicker and cleaner.

#4 Account group updates: Sell Bulk Subscriptions, Both Personally or Commercially

You can now do much more with account groups in eSuite, including:

Virtual Terminal – Due to the volume and associated cost of setting up an account group, we’ve made it possible to purchase a subscription for an account group via eSuite Virtual Terminal, either over the phone or with a customer sales representative.

eSuite HQ – It is now possible to purchase a group subscription for a customer that is already in an account group and allocate an existing subscription to a new or existing account group.

eSuite SDK – we’ve built a shiny new user journey flow into eSuite SDK v4.0, due to go live early 2018, which will enable customers to purchase an account group or additional licences in their browser, as well as self-manage within our customer self-care pages.

#5 Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Additional Security Layers

eSuite has further increased authentication-security, by implementing Two Factor Authentication (2FA). The feature follows a security process where a user of our back-office management console, eSuite HQ, provides two means of identification from separate categories of credentials – most commonly a username and password on one device, and a randomly generated, time-restricted code on another. The process uses Google Authenticator; arguably the most widely used free authentication app downloadable on most mobile devices, to verify their identity, making the experience as quick and painless as possible. We remain 100% committed to keeping our clients’ data secure and by implementing additional security measures such as 2FA, as well as adopting best practice data protection standards adhering to the likes of PCI-DSS Level 1, GDPR and ISO 27001, our clients can sleep easy.

You can find part two of our two-part blog series here. Learn more about our favourite eSuite features launched in 2017!