How Chargebee Cut Down Livestorm’s Support Time by Half

The Problem

The folks at Livestorm stuck to using their in-house billing and invoicing system along with Stripe. 6 months down, they saw their volumes soar.

But it just wasn’t reliable enough to manage billing for all their customers as they scaled.

“Before Chargebee we didn’t use a billing software and were doing it all from Stripe and in-house invoice generation and data sends via webhooks. But it has its limits as a payment management system, especially when it comes to managing individual users, and getting specific with actions to take," says Robin Lambert, Co-founder & CPO, Livestorm.

They realized the need for a system that can help with

• Accurate handling of EU-VAT calculation

• Proration for complex pricing models

• Handling credit notes for refunds and cancellations

They realised they had to build a lot of these features on Stripe, and it was clear that it wasn't the best use of their time.

The Solution

Livestorm’s encounter with Chargebee happened soon after they realized the need for a third-party service to manage their billing, as issues like customer queries on delinquent payments, and handling upgrades and downgrades took away time and attention from building their core product. After comparing the feature sets and services of Chargebee against Recurly, Chargify, and Octobat, Livestorm decided Chargebee offered all that they needed and much more.

Chargebee was a one-stop solution for all their payments and subscription billing needs. But as a spill-over of this change, Livestorm was able to boost the productivity of their support team, they had lesser and lesser billing queries to work on and were able to focus on product support.

Impact

Livestorm was able to reduce the number of support tickets by 50%. More specifically, Chargebee helped Livestorm with the following:

• Handling discounts and coupons became a lot simpler, which would have otherwise been complex with just Stripe

• Complexities that come along with handling EU-VAT rules are also addressed with Chargebee

• Diversified payment methods by adding more payment gateways and methods brought in additional channels of revenue

“We have a few customers who can’t pay us through entering a credit card with automated payments and Chargebee can handle such payments and account for them thanks to their integration with GoCardless apart from Stripe. We get so much more out of Chargebee. It aggregates all our payment gateways which ensures we don’t miss any revenue," says Robin Lambert, Co-founder & CPO of Livestorm.

"We needed a reliable solution to deal with refunds, coupons, finding delinquent payments/users etc. We also had issues with VAT rules - being based out of European Union, proration logic, and credit notes. And payments isn’t our core expertise.

Robin Lambert, Co-founder & CPO, Livestorm