Mindbody Case Study

Mindbody Utilizes Aria Systems to Automate Billing Processes and Increase Customer Satisfaction

Overview

Industry
Cloud Commerce Solutions
Headquarters
New York, NY

Challenges

Solution

Benefits

Mindbody provides an all-in-one commerce platform that helps business owners acquire new customers, book appointments, process payments, manage employees, and build long-term client relationships. Their platform unifies the essential needs of running a service business into a single web-based system that's accessible from any device. Mindbody enables businesses to sell services online, through websites and mobile apps, at their physical location, and through a network of partner sites. Because the Mindbody Platform is all-in-one, it ties every customer interaction—from booking to payment method to upsell to retention—back to the customer records so business owners can see why customers patronize their businesses and how they can be served better.

The Challenge

Mindbody's top priority is helping business owners serve their customers and run their business better. As the company grew, their homegrown billing and accounting system became stressed, making it more difficult to service their customers.
The manual processes required by Mindbody's homegrown systems were particularly evident when it came to dunning. Notifications for expiring cards were performed manually, as were follow-ups on expired cards, stopping services on unpaid accounts, and restarting services on updated accounts. The process was slow, prone to mistakes, and services were often left running on unpaid accounts causing revenue leakage.

CASE STUDY

The Solution

Mindbody needed a billing and monetization system that could not only help reduce manual intervention, but that would easily integrate with its existing systems like their operating platform, Salesforce CRM, taxation platforms, and payment gateways. After carefully researching its options, Mindbody chose Aria Systems. Aria's Active Orchestration™ allows it to completely automate the dunning process. It integrates seamlessly with both their platform and Salesforce allowing them to structure billing to fit their business needs.

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The Benefits

With Aria handling automation of billing and payments, Mindbody was able to significantly reduce revenue leakage and virtually eliminate time-consuming manual processing. Integrated dunning allowed Mindbody to automatically send notifications and reminders to customers for expiring or declined credit cards. Now their customers could update their credit card information themselves. Reprocessing of declined cards was also automated, which was previously done manually. When credit cards cannot be processed, Aria handles service suspension and follow-up notifications instead of a person. Mindbody's customer service team was therefore able to focus more time on keeping customers happy. These improvements increased customer satisfaction and kept the revenue flowing.

Aria also allowed straightforward integration with Mindbody's existing Salesforce implementation. This gives anyone in the organization (who is working with customers) easy, one-stop access to complete profiles, including billing and payment history, speeding up service calls and resolution times.

"Aria has made it much less labor-intensive to provide outstanding service to our customers; being in the service industry themselves, they expect nothing but the best," said Rosemary Biagioni, vice president and controller for Mindbody. "Automating all the payment processes allows us to use our resources much more effectively and put a cap on leakage."

Integration with Avalara's AvaTax was also a boon for Mindbody. Businesses in every corner of the world use its service commerce platform, so they have to figure out how to charge, report, and file sales tax in thousands of localities that all have different tax laws—tantamount to a logistical nightmare. Mindbody was able to leverage Aria's integration with Avalara AvaTax to significantly reduce resources dedicated to tax accounting. "Aria and Avalara's AvaTax solution takes a huge burden off of us. The tax rules and records are always up to date and Avalara does the filing, so we know we've paid the right taxes to the right agencies at the right time," said Biagioni.

"With Aria, we can focus on our customers, our core competencies, and continue to grow."

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