How to maintain steady cash flow during the COVID-19 crisis using Zoho Subscriptions
Dear customers,
I hope this finds you and your loved ones in good health.
We're all witnessing the effect that COVID-19 is having on businesses throughout the world. As consumers try to conserve their own resources, businesses can expect to receive more cancellation requests than usual.
Here are some useful tips to help you be flexible and keep your customer base:
1. Communicate candidly and clearly with your customers:
During this period, transparent communication with customers is a necessity. A lot of businesses have started displaying messages on their home pages, explaining their BCP (Business Continuity Process) and other important announcements they want to convey to their customers.
As an additional means of communication, you can use the banner message in the customer portal of Zoho Subscriptions. The banner message is visible in the home page of the portal, so it can help get the customer's attention quickly. You can set up this message under Settings > Preferences > Branding > Portal settings.
2. Put renewals on a temporary hold:
i) Pause and resume subscriptions
It's a good idea to provide your customers the option to freeze their subscriptions temporarily, rather than canceling them altogether. By giving them an option to pause their subscriptions, you are letting your customers know that they can rely on you when it's time to resume. It's also a good way to encourage customers to stick with you for their next purchase instead of switching vendors.
Here's how you can pause a subscription in Zoho Subscriptions:
ii) Extend the billing date:
Even customers who love your service may have difficulty paying for it on time right now. One way to keep these customers from canceling is to push back the date for their next subscription payment. By offering uninterrupted service and a little more time to pay, you're giving them a good reason to remain loyal. To do this, just update the subscription's Next Billing Date in Zoho Subscriptions and they won't be charged until the new date.
3. Be approachable:
As a standard business practice, you might have set up automatic payment reminders in Zoho Subscriptions to go out on specific days before or after the invoice due date. However, given the current circumstances, you can definitely expect delays in payment.
Since you have control over the content that goes out in these reminder emails, think about rephrasing it to let your customers know that if they need any assistance, they can reach out to you by phone or email. This way, your finance team doesn't have to wait and wonder whether the customer will make their payment or not, or spend time sending extra emails. You can tweak your reminder email content under Settings > Reminders.
By making it easy for your customers to approach you and treating them on a case-by-case basis, you can actually bring down the number of unpaid transactions.
4. Offer credits:
Another way to earn the customer's goodwill is to create special offers to assist them. For instance, Zoho's Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP) offers subscription credits to businesses in need. If you want to adopt a similar practice for your business, you can create credit notes in Zoho Subscriptions and enable the Redeem Credit Notes option so that it is automatically applied for the upcoming renewal.
5. Don't auto-cancel services upon non-payment:
Most subscription businesses have automated their billing process in such a way that if the customer doesn't pay, the subscription is automatically canceled. While this is a good practice most of the time, you might want to adopt a flexible approach during this crisis.
Instead of letting the subscriptions be canceled automatically, you can monitor the Under Risk report in Zoho Subscriptions, and contact those customers to suggest alternate payment arrangements for your services.
6. Know why your customers leave:
During difficult times, businesses and customers alike aim to cut costs and reduce their spending. If your customers are canceling right now, make sure you give them a chance to say why they're leaving. You might be able to retain them by offering some flexibility, or it may be best to reach out to them later and see if they're ready to come back. Even if you can't keep them as a customer, knowing why they left still helps you improve your service going forward.
In Zoho Subscriptions, you have the option to make the Cancelation Reason field mandatory. You can configure this under Settings > Preferences > Subscription > Cancellation Preferences.
Though some of these tips might have a negative effect on your finances temporarily, they can gain you long-term benefits like customer loyalty and customer retention, which will help your business recover more easily.
Did you find these tips useful? Can you think of some other best practices that businesses can use to get through difficult times? Let us know in the comments.
Note from Zoho: If you need any assistance regarding Zoho Subscriptions, our support team is available 24 hours a day, Monday-Friday. You can also reach out to us through email (support@zohosubscriptions.com) or phone.
Because Zoho recognizes that our own customers may be facing difficult times right now, we have rolled out an Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP) to help small businesses through this crisis. Learn more about this program.
Take care and stay safe! We'll get through this storm together.
Regards,
Harikrishna
Customer Relations | Zoho Finance
Access your files securely from anywhere
New to Zoho Recruit?
Zoho Developer Community
New to Zoho LandingPage?
Zoho LandingPage Resources
New to Zoho Survey?
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
New to Bigin?
Topic Participants
Harikrishna
Peter Jordan
ar
Sticky Posts
Introducing Invoice Consolidation for Offline Subscriptions
Hello Folks, Glad to announce the feature of Invoice Consolidation for Offline Subscriptions. If you are having multiple subscriptions for your customers, now, you can send a single consolidated invoice for all the Offline Subscriptions that are getting renewed on the same date. Advantage? Customers will be receiving single invoice instead of multiple invoices upon renewal. Also reduces your efforts in follow-up with your customers for payment collections. For Example: If Customer has SubscriptionNew feature: Create back-dated subscriptions
Hello from the Zoho Subscriptions team. :) We’re happy to announce that today marks the launch of a much-awaited feature: creating back-dated subscriptions! From here on out, whenever you create a new subscription with an activation date that is earlier than the present date, you’ll no longer get an error. Instead, you'll be creating a back-dated subscription. This means that the subscription started at that earlier point in time. The next billing date will be calculated automatically based onAnnouncement Regarding Notification Emails
Hello Everyone! This announcement is regarding the admin notification emails which you've been receiving from the email address "support@zohosubscriptions.com". From the 1st of October, 06:00 GMT, the emails with the following subjects will be sent from "no-reply@zohosubscriptions.com". Unable to send invoice for the profile - {profile_name} Unable to process auto payments. If you have set up any filters or workflow in your email account, please add "no-reply@zohosubscriptions.com” and “support@zohosubscriptions.com”Zoho Subscriptions plugin for WordPress
Zoho Subscriptions plugin for WordPress allows you to easily embed your plan specific checkout page in an iframe with just a few mouse clicks and without a single line of code. How can WordPress Zoho Subscriptions Plugin boost your productivity? It's now easier to embed Zoho Subscriptions checkout page in your WordPress site. Forget the old method of logging in to Zoho Subscriptions, copying a URL and scripting to make adjustments. All this can be done automatically through this plugin. A great timeIndian GST organisation Migration Guide
With respect to the new GST regime releasing on July 1, 2017in India, Zoho Subscriptions Indian edition is also gearing up to make your business GST Ready. This article focuses on how to get your existing organisation in Zoho Subscriptions to migrate to the new GST regime. Note: Any organisation created on or after July 1, 2017 will already be GST ready. You wouldn't have to migrate your organisation. Migrating your existing organisation to support GST To migrate your existing organisation to
New to Zoho TeamInbox?
Zoho TeamInbox Resources
Zoho CRM Plus Resources
Zoho Books Resources
Zoho Subscriptions Resources
Zoho Projects Resources
Zoho Sprints Resources
Qntrl Resources
Zoho Creator Resources
Zoho CRM Resources
Design. Discuss. Deliver.
Zoho Show Resources
Get Started. Write Away!
Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.
Zoho CRM コンテンツ
-
オンラインヘルプ
-
Webセミナー
-
機能活用動画
-
よくある質問
-
Ebook
-
-
Zoho Campaigns
- Zoho サービスのWebセミナー
その他のサービス コンテンツ
Nederlandse Hulpbronnen
ご検討中の方
Recent Topics
Celebrating 200 posts of Kaizen! Share your ideas for the milestone post
Hello Developers, We launched the Kaizen series in 2019 to share helpful content to support your Zoho CRM development journey. Staying true to its spirit—Kaizen Series: Continuous Improvement for Developer Experience—we've shared everything from FAQsZoho Sheets working offline
Hi, I am looking for the ability to work offline in Zoho Sheets, but currently I cannot find the process to complete this. Does someone have any ideas or steps I might have missed? Also does Zoho Sheets have the "Format as Tables" function as is currentlyFetching whole month availability via API
We are currently building a custom calendar component that books directly into our client's Zoho Bookings instance. The challenge we are facing is that your API only allows fetching availability one day at a time, which is problematic. Our second workaroundreCAPTCHA
Is the Bookings form protected by reCAPTCHA, or some mechanism to ensure submission of the appointment request form is made by a human vs. bot?Recent enhancements to Bigin's workflows and Associated Products
Greetings, I hope all of you are doing well! We're happy to announce a few recent enhancements we've made to Bigin. Let's go over each one in detail. Enhancement to workflows Trigger workflows when specific fields are modified to specific values Previously,Zoho Survey Goes to Junk Folder
Hello, My company is wanting to use Zoho Survey to send out a customer satisfaction survey, and we were wondering if Zoho Campaigns allows the emails to not go into their junk folder. We sent out a test email campaign to our team and for some people it went to their inbox and for others it went to their junk folder. Is there a way to eliminate this from happening? Hope to hear from you soon! Thanks!Nifty enhancements to Reports in Zoho CRM
Dear Customers, We hope you’re well! We are here with a line of useful enhancements to Reports in Zoho CRM that are readily available to access. Include or exclude Record ID in the report export Display currency fields in record currency Capture reportneed a formula to return value as shown (zoho sheet)
Dear folks, What should be the formula in cell B3 to get that output, based on input sheet data.need a formula to return value as shown (zoho sheet)
Hello folks, what should be the formula in B3, to get the value shown based on input sheet ranges. thanks in advance.Playground: An exclusive test environment to analyze Field Prediction accuracy
Hello everyone, We are introducing Playground: an exclusive proactive testing environment for businesses to analyze Zia's prediction accuracy. This allows admins and agents to: Run predictions on actual tickets or specific content for realistic test conditions.Attention: Upcoming changes to Zoho Assist support for older windows versions
At Zoho Assist, our goal is to provide you with secure, reliable, and feature-rich remote support experiences. To maintain this standard, we periodically align our platform with the latest technology and security updates from the broader software ecosystem.Send again email with link for signup
Hello, I have a lot of problem to send contract my email, also missing the features "share link". How can I send again email to client and me wit link for signup a contract? Everytime it's a disaster!How do I synchronize a quote to an opportunity?
Hi everyone, We don't quote anything via Zoho but we use it to track services/products so that I can see what was actually sold, vs an opportunity with just shows an amount. We use the quotes for other purposes, mostly to request a quote from Salesforce but we don't invoice or do sales orders or anything. (Basically a user makes a quick quote in Zoho, adds items and pricing, and then exports to PDF which gets emailed to our Quote Desk who then enters the request into Salesforce). Just wonderingZoho Sprints Android app update: Tags and Epic search
Hello everyone! We are excited to introduce tags and an option to search items within Epic module on the latest Android version(v2.0.2) of the Zoho Sprints mobile app. Let's take a look at these features: Tags You can now create, edit, and delete tags,Zoho CRM Webhooks - Dynamic URL
Hi Zoho, We've noted a gap in the webhooks function that if improved would increase use cases significantly. The "URL to Notify" field in "Create a Webhook" only supports static information. We have a number of use cases where we could use webhooks moreWork Order Creation Issue
Dear Team, I would like to inquire about the daily limit for Work Order creation in Zoho FSM. Yesterday (02/05/2025) at around 6:30 PM GST, I attempted to create a Work Order, but I have been unable to do so since then. Please find the attached imageTracking on Zoho Booking
Hi We want to use Zoho Booking for our appointment management. We're using Calendly as of now that lets us track sources of the appointments made including UTM parameters. Is there a way for us to do same with Zoho Bookings?Pre-created Popular Zoho Flows returns with 404 Error
Your popular Zoho Flows are returning with a 404 page error. This applies to all work flows in your Gallery Space. See video here for further clarification. When will this be fixed? https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kDl4ni5EQeLHWeaoIDdtRqoUbW8FNLfO?usp=sharingCRM Feature Request
When enabling Translation in Zoho CRM I would like to see the ability to remove the language "English (US)". I have encountered a user experience issue with a client recently. The client uses English (UK) but they are based in Spain, so they have activatedImport your Google Docs Spreadsheets into Zoho Sheet
You can now import your Google spreadsheet into Zoho Sheet. This will be useful if you want to switch to Zoho Sheet or if you want to simply try out Zoho Sheet. If you don't have an account with Zoho, you can still try this by signing in with your Google account. Here is a video on how to do this. Note: Existing charts won't appear in spreadsheets you import from Google Docs as the Export functionality of Google Docs doesn't give out the charts. Check out the announcement in our blog: https://blogs.zoho.com/general/import-google-docs-into-zoho-productivity-suiteSupport Mixed Visibility Settings in Knowledge Base Categories
Hello Zoho Desk Team, We hope you're all doing well. We’d like to submit a feature request regarding visibility settings in the Knowledge Base module. 🎯 Current Limitation As of today, when a category is set to a specific visibility level (e.g., Public),Will a campaign send duplicates is same email is on two separate lists
Hi I have two lists to which I want to send campaign. One list is ALL leads and other is list of opportunities and current students. There is overlap between the two lists My question is if I send one campaign to all, will zoho automatically know only to send the email once to the duplicate email?Time Based Report / Dashboard
We measure our support agent's KPI based on their response time and resolution time from the time the ticket is assigned to them The time based dashboard should provide this information however there is a problem with us referring to this dashboard WeZoho Learn API Access?
We love using Zoho Learn to manage our internal trainings and knowledge base. What we'd really love is to be able to query Learn via API so that in Zoho Projects, Zoho Creator, or Zoho Desk, we can recommend relevant Learn articles and manuals to teamcreating buttons in zoho site
the connection between zoho site and zoho learn will be awesome and amazing feature so the user instead of registering himself twice just one time register on zoho site will be enough and creating accout on zoho learn instead of registering on zoho learnTwo Problems with the Description Field
Our ticket workflow is often like this. Client calls or emails (to a personal email address) reporting a problem. We create a ticket and enter a description. Problems: 1. By my way of thinking when we enter a description, that is an internal comment (unless we mark it public). Yet it seems there is no way to mark it internal, and Desk just starts inserting it into communications. 2. Additionally, in the conversation view it makes it appear it was emailed by the customer and inserts their name onLookup Field limitations
Good day all, Is anyone else frustrated with the lookup field limitation? I have an enterprise license, but I only get 10 lookups. Additionally, the custom module has been available for a while and is still in diapers. If you want good reporting, youAutomation#36: Auto-create time-entry after performing the Blueprint transition
Hello Everyone, This week’s edition focuses on configuring a custom function within Zoho Desk to streamline time tracking within the Blueprint. In this case, we create a custom field, and request the agent to enter the spending time within the singleDynamically Sync zoho.adminuserid with Current App Admin
Hello Zoho Team, We hope you're doing well. We’d like to request an important enhancement to the Deluge sendmail task functionality. As per the current behavior, in most Zoho services (excluding Zoho Cliq, Zoho Connect, Zoho Mail, and Zoho Sheet), the"Improper Statement" Error on Deluge Loops (while/for) when Processing a Date Range
Hello, Zoho Community, I'm facing a very specific issue with a Deluge script and would appreciate any insights from the community. The Goal: I have a form (ausencia_visitadoras) where a user inputs a start date and an end date for a period of absence.Zoho Meeting iOS app update: Hearing aid, bluetooth car audio and AirPlay audio support.
Hello everyone! We are excited to announce the below new features in the latest iOS update(v1.7.4) of the Zoho Meeting app: 1. Hearing aid support: Hearing aid support has been integrated into the application. 2. Bluetooth car Audio, AirPlay audio support:Automating Daily Lottery Result Publishing with Zoho Creator or Flow – Any Best Practices?
Hello Zoho Community, I run a results-based informational website in Brazil called CaminhoDaSorte.com, where we publish daily Jogo do Bicho results. Right now, we're doing this process manually every day — but we’re looking to automate the backend usingissues with manually shipping sales orders - advise needed please
we are new to zoho inventory. we are going to roll the program out to our company within a couple of weeks and during the implementation process we have come into a roadblock with manually packaging and shipping sales orders. its important to note importantI do not see the “Lead Forms” option under Integrations
Hi, I’m using Zoho Social on a Premium plan. I’ve connected LinkedIn Company Page and have a valid LinkedIn Ad Account with Lead Gen Forms. However, I do not see the “Lead Forms” option under Integrations, so I can’t enable LinkedIn Lead Generation. PleaseSTOCK function showing #N/A! even thought the Stock symbol is valid
Zoho Team, I use STOCK function on Zoho Sheet to fetch the recent Last Closing Price. Some stock symbols are valid but when the STOCK function is applied, it shows #N/A! Attaching an image for reference.What’s the Correct Integration Flow Between Zoho Inventory, ShipStation, and Multi-Channel Sales Platforms?
Hi Zoho Community, I’m currently implementing Zoho One to manage all of my business processes, and I’d appreciate some guidance on the correct integration flow for the tools I’m using. Here’s my current setup: Zoho Inventory is my central system for managingBeyond Email: #4 Note taking done right with Notes
With her favorite links now saved in Bookmarks, Sarah is feeling even more at home in Zoho Mail. As her day fills up with meetings and project discussions, she often finds herself scribbling quick ideas and reminders—only to lose track of them later.When will Sales Order and Invoice Synchronisation with Zoho CRM be Available?
When will Sales Orders and Invoices, created in Zoho Books or Inventory be made available in Zoho CRM? John Legg Owner: The Debug StoreGenerate Unique Customer ID for Each for All Contacts
Generate Unique Customer ID for Each for All ContactsBookings to Books automation using Flow
I'm using Zoho Flow to automate a process between Bookings and Books. When someone uses Bookings to schedule time with me I use Flow to automatically add the person as a customer in books, then create a Quote in Books for the type of consultation theyNext Page