Tag Archives: retention

Carbon Reduction, News, Sustainability

Clarion Wealth Planning brings forward carbon neutral plans

Clarion Wealth Planning is accelerating its plans to become carbon neutral as part of a new initiative called Best Service, Best Workplace, Best World.

The company had been aiming for carbon neutral status by next April but is now expecting to achieve the milestone by the autumn.

Clarion, which is based in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, is working with Carbon Neutral Britain, an organisation which helps businesses and individuals to offset their environmental footprint and achieve carbon neutral status by investing in renewable energy sources, tree planting and other green schemes worldwide.

Alongside this, Clarion has made electric vehicle ownership more cost effective for staff by introducing a car leasing salary sacrifice scheme. Clarion also plants 10 trees for every new client gained, and has implemented measures to reduce energy usage at its offices.

Founder Ron Walker said: “We are committed to creating better lives for our clients, colleagues and our community. It’s at the very core of our values.

“As part of this, we recently launched our Best Service, Best Workplace, Best World programme, and our goal of becoming carbon neutral by the autumn forms part of this.

“We felt it necessary to stand up and be counted and accelerate our strategy to reduce our carbon footprint. Every step taken to tackle climate change is a positive one.”

Clarion, which has 20 staff, provides lifelong financial planning to business owners and families across the north west and beyond.

As part of its Best World strategy and alongside its green measures, the firm supports the Clarion Welsby Family Foundation charity, which donates to worthy local and national causes and community projects.

The charity has supported the Climb High project, run by Adventures Await, which introduces young people with disabilities from Cheshire and Greater Manchester to indoor climbing, helping to build their confidence and skills to improve their physical and mental health and employability.

Another charity to benefit is Dog A.I.D, which trains family pets to become specialist assistance dogs for their physically disabled owners.

Meanwhile, chartered financial planner Ella Davies has become a mentor to teenage girls on a programme organised by the charity Girls Out Loud.

Clarion has introduced a raft of new employee benefits under its Best Workplace banner, including more flexible working, private medical insurance, a doubling of matched pension contributions, and free gym membership.

Now, following a staff survey seeking suggestions for ways in which the firm could help them develop new personal skills, Clarion is introducing private Spanish and Italian lessons for employees during work time.

Ron said: “We work hard and get on with the job, and do fantastic things as a company for our clients, and we want people to enjoy the journey with us and develop as individuals.

“It’s not all about work or business in our drive to be the best workplace. No-one is under the thumb for 12 hours a day. We treat people as grown-ups and they are able to come and go and work flexibly.

“We see past the 9-5 and recognise the importance of looking after our team. We have good quality people, and we want them to enjoy a good work-life balance.

“As well as being known as the best financial planning practice, we want to be known as the best place to work.

“Our approach is key to ensuring the commitment and loyalty of the people who are here, and helps us to attract recruits of the highest quality.”

Ron added: “In the financial planning world, the service we provide to our clients is unrivalled in terms of depth, quality, and the degree of time and attention we give to them.

“We really work with them to achieve their life goals, and this is the Best Service aspect of our initiative. It’s central to our growth plans, as is the Best Workplace aspect.

“And it’s our responsibility to do what we can for the Best World.”

News

Chargebee enables subscription businesses to combat economic turmoil with 2022 Summer Product Release

Chargebee, the leading subscription management platform, today announced its Summer 2022 Product Release. The slate of new products and features is focused on enabling high-performing subscription businesses to monetise their existing customers and fend off the growing threats of a tumultuous economy. These new products help businesses build their cash reserves and maintain their customer base at a time when many businesses – and their customers – are struggling with the realities of inflation and drying up of venture capital, the lingering effects of COVID-19, and a decimated global supply chain.

The centrepiece of Chargebee’s Summer 2022 Product Release is Chargebee Retention, formerly Brightback, which, along with Chargebee Receivables (numberz), and RevRec (RevLock), all acquired by Chargebee over the last 18 months, represent Chargebee’s initial foray into becoming a true multi-product company.

Chargebee Retention allows businesses to focus on keeping the customers they already have at a time when both businesses and consumers are being forced to evaluate everything in their portfolios and make difficult decisions. Chargebee Retention enables businesses to customise cancellation experiences with offers geared towards continuing the customer relationship and allows businesses to test out personalised retention-magnet strategies to minimise voluntary churn and strengthen customer lifetime value with an ROI of as much as 800%.

“For subscription businesses, acquiring new customers is at least 2.5 times more expensive than upselling or expanding an existing customer. This factor can be even higher with intelligent automation that decreases customer churn while increasing the chances of expansion,” said Mark Thomason, IDC Research Director responsible for Digital Business Models and Monetisation practice. “While these retention capabilities are critical during these tumultuous times, keeping happy customers is always in vogue.”

Chargebee Receivables, formerly numberz, helps businesses improve their cash flow management processes by automating accounts receivable workflows. Subscription businesses will now be able to efficiently automate their entire accounts receivables workflow and process from purchase to payment. In addition, Chargebee Receivables also lets businesses proactively engage with customers on predicted payment failure to minimise involuntary churn and increase customer retention.

“Customer retention has become an even bigger focus for us over the past year or so,” said Bob Viscount, Vice President at Silhouette U. “The economy has changed a lot, and we’ve been looking for a solution that helps mitigate some of the cancellations we’ve been seeing. Customers have chosen to cancel due to cost and having an option to deflect some of these cancellations with a tailored offer in the moment has been a huge boost to our business. Chargebee Retention has proven to be a value-add to our business and has allowed us to provide customers with a comprehensive review of what they’d be giving up while also leveraging offers when needed. The results in a very short amount of time have convinced me that this needs to be a critical component to our business moving forward.”

The volatility of today’s market landscape has forced businesses to become adaptable and nimble in ways they hadn’t previously expected, tinkering with package and feature offerings and providing new and different services to customers at different price points. The new Chargebee Entitlements offers businesses more control over this new path and enables them to upsell to existing customers by showing them value. Chargebee Entitlements enables businesses to “value-test” and experiment with different packaging and pricing options, better control feature launches with roll-outs to small subsets of customers, and go to market faster. Chargebee Entitlements helps go-to-market teams provide feature access to customers beyond their plan on the flip of a switch, which can be used to incentivise plan upgrades and free-to-paid conversions.

“We’ve spent months engaging with our customers, learning the ins and outs of their businesses and working with them to determine what types of tools they want and need to face their current challenges head-on,” said John Pearce, Vice President of Product Management at Chargebee. “In those conversations, the focus almost always homed in on retaining customers, building long-lasting customer relationships and understanding how Chargebee can help businesses monetise their existing customer base. Chargebee Retention, Chargebee Receivables and Chargebee Entitlements are a direct result of our findings and our desire to give our customers exactly what they need to build and scale their businesses, even in these trying times.”

The complete list of features in Chargebee’s Summer 2022 Product Release, which also includes in-app purchase management, multi-entity management, integration with PandaDoc to manage quote-based subscription workflows, a RevRec integration that helps businesses recognise revenue in local currency and avoid challenges that hinder growth, and RevRec’s ASC 606 expense recognition, can be found here: https://www.chargebee.com/summer-release-2022/

News

Explorance launches breakthrough tool for employee experience management

Text-based open-ended employee feedback is traditionally challenging for enterprise organisations to analyse and interpret, but this unruly qualitative data can now offer the richest and most actionable insights to business and HR leaders.

Now, Explorance, a leader in Experience Management (XM) solutions, has introduced BlueML: the only machine learning-powered comment analysis solution specifically trained to turn employee responses into decision-grade intelligence. With BlueML, business leaders can make sense of — and make decisions from — the unstructured data gathered from employee surveys and other sources of feedback, driving meaningful and actionable insights in just seconds.

Until now, comment analysis tools only leveraged machine learning models trained to analyse generic text-based data, rather than real employee comments. BlueML is a “text analytics first” BI solution whose models have been trained on HR-specific content across different industries and organisations and include employee feedback around culture, onboarding, engagement, exit surveys and more.

The BlueML dashboard automatically scans and categorises employee comments and provides polarity sentiment analysis and forward-looking recommendations that drive insight and action. BlueML allows HR leaders to work with data and compare data sources and inputs in real-time, providing the insights they need to identify trends, challenges and opportunities.

“Talent is one of the biggest issues businesses are facing this year, presenting three critical challenges: recruitment, retention and inclusion,” explained Samer Saab, Founder and CEO of Explorance. “Businesses are collecting more employee feedback than ever before, yet they lack the tools to easily and accurately analyse and interpret this feedback. BlueML enables business leaders to not only listen to their employees’ feedback, but to take timely and meaningful action in response.”

Through its ability to quickly analyse comments at enterprise scale, BlueML helps each and every employee’s voice to be heard, supporting employee wellbeing, diversity, equity and inclusion, and driving meaningful feedback, engagement and retention while enhancing speed to impact. BlueML’s models learn and improve over time, continuously getting “smarter” and more accurate, delivering the richest insights possible to support companies’ biggest talent decisions.

BlueML is an integral part of Explorance’s full suite of Employee Experience Management solutions, including the recently updated Blue 8.0 XM platform. BlueML can also augment companies’ existing XM technology stacks by providing a scalable method for analysing text-based content from virtually any source, including both solicited feedback, such as employee surveys, and unsolicited feedback such as on social media. BlueML delivers unparalleled comment categorisation, sentiment analysis, insights, and recommendations that help HR leaders efficiently manage the employee experience “from hire to retire.”