TheSchoolRun is an online education platform designed to help school children's parents support and foster their child's education. They were founded after the team of mothers behind TheSchoolRun faced this very challenge in their own lives and wanted to find a solution for to help others.

Since its launch, the motto of this UK-based team has been to empower parents to help unleash the full potential of their children and give them the best possible start in life, without having to worry about constantly evolving curriculum. They made this dream real by creating a platform with thousands of interactive resources aligned with the primary school syllabi to break down concepts and make learning fun.

The search

TheSchoolRun offers a free plan that can provide users with access to some of its resources and lessons for students, while other content is paywalled for premium subscribers.

Up until 2018, TheSchoolRun was using Worldpay for its subscription billing operations. As their student-friendly lessons garnered more and more traction, their business scaled and so did their billing requirements. "Given our diverse product portfolio, we wanted a software that could be much more flexible, something that allows us to communicate with our customers the way we want," said Dani Zur, Director at TheSchoolRun.

Besides personalization of customer communication, Zur wanted in-depth reporting that would allow her to make better data-driven decisions. She was also looking for ways to empower their customers to control their subscription profile, which in turn would reduce the influx of inquiries to their customer success team.

After seeing that Zoho Subscriptions satisfied each of these needs, Zur's team looked no further.

The solution

After configuring their plans and connecting their Zoho Subscriptions account with Stripe for payment collection, Zur's team imported their customer subscriptions from Worldpay to kickstart their billing operations with Zoho.

TheSchoolRun's website allows users to sign up for a 14-day trial. Once the trial ends, the users are charged a subscription fee based on the plan they choose during signup. Beneath each payment plan lies a secure checkout page powered by Zoho Subscriptions, completely personalized to collect all the details Zur's team needs from their subscribers. The webhooks set up between their platform and Zoho Subscriptions listen to subscription events and ensure the information across both platforms stays in sync.

Zoho Subscriptions allows users to enter notes under each customer profile, specifically for an organization's internal reference.

It may sound simple, but the ability to enter comments for internal purposes is extremely handy to keep track of every single discussion with the customer. By allowing us to maintain all details of our customers in a single place, Zoho Subscriptions, in fact, doubles as our CRM tool.

- Dani Zur, Director, TheSchoolRun

The self-service customer portal is another aspect that TheSchoolRun team loves, as it empowers their customers have complete control of their subscriptions, allowing them to view and download any information they want. Zur's team is now planning to implement single sign-on (SSO) to facilitate a seamless login experience between the subscriber portal that they offer and Zoho Subscriptions' portal.

"Personalization is something we care about a lot, and it's one of the reasons we chose Zoho Subscriptions. It allows us to completely customize our customer touchpoints—be it the payment screens, the email notifications, or the customer portal," Zur added.

The benefits

Zur loves crunching numbers and deriving insight through actionable data, which is exactly what Zoho Subscriptions' in-depth revenue analytics provide. Zur starts her day by going through the signups and activations that occurred the previous day.

Zoho Subscriptions' dashboard and in-depth analytics help me understand the activation and cancellation trends, churn rate, the performance of each plan, and so on. This is crucial for us to know how customers perceive our offerings, and to fine-tune their experience further.

Zur's team also encourages their customers to purchase one of their books through marketing campaigns. Since these are one-off purchases, Zoho Checkout comes in handy. "Zoho Subscriptions helps us access all our customer information—the subscription billing as well as their book purchases—in a single place, without having to switch between tabs or log in to multiple apps. By allowing us to access and make changes to data easily, Zoho Subscriptions has increased our overall productivity at least by 20 percent," said Zur.