Motive is the leading fleet management platform for the trucking industry with more than one million registered drivers, 250,000 trucks and 50,000 for-hire carriers. Its mission is to build modern technology products that will usher antiquated trucking businesses into the digital world. Its subscription-based products and services are used for fuel tax reporting, GPS tracking, vehicle utilization, and other means to increase safety, efficiency, and productivity.

Early on, Motive realized that it needed to adopt a multi-channel growth strategy and be able to offer flexible pricing and packaging to meet evolving customer needs. In 2016, the company chose to use the Zuora Central Platform and Zuora Billing to manage its subscription financial operations allowing the company to sell through various channels, offer its subscribers different pricing options, and automate many of the resultant downstream impacts.

In 2017, a new government mandate demanded that all truck drivers record their hours of service using electronic logging devices (ELDs). About 80% of Motive’s subscribers are owner-operators and small trucking companies that have historically relied on pen and paper logs to manage their business. The new mandate hit this segment especially hard and they turned to Motive to help them manage this major change.

“Many large shipping companies have built their own ELDs. And then you have small owner-operator trucking companies who just want to get paid to drive. They don’t have the resources to manage the new ELD requirements,” explained Ben Seeman, Credit and Collection Manager at Motive. “So, we provide them the service and necessary hardware to be compliant with the law. For an annual fee, we ship them a piece of hardware to plug into the truck, and they can just focus on finding the next load.”

The company grew from $10 million to $60 million in revenue between 2017-2018. But growth brought its challenges. Since a majority of the company’s subscribers work on a thin budget and struggle to keep up with back-office work from the cab of a truck, Motive’s major challenge was handling large volumes of overdue invoices. These were subscribers who wanted to continue using the service but would miss a payment because they changed credit cards or didn’t have the time to send in a payment. Motive was using a manual collections process to notify and follow up with subscribers that simply couldn’t scale when its customer base exploded.

Enter Zuora.

“During Q4 we had 3,000 credit cards failures. We couldn’t manually email all of those customers, and we were falling behind due to the high volume,” said Seeman. KeepTruckin used Zuora Central’s Workflow Builder, a tool that helps orchestrate financial operations and trigger external processes such as provisioning, data integrations, and customer communications to solve the problem. “I created a workflow with Zuora’s Workflow Builder and now notifications are emailed automatically.”

Regular renewal reminders over email and text messages keep customers informed about upcoming bills and educated about technology processes. Zuora also helps the company weed out bad credit cards before charges fail. All of this has resulted in fewer overdue invoices and fewer chargebacks by customers who get charged without intending to renew. Most importantly, it has increased revenue and improved subscriber retention since fewer accounts are now canceled due to non-payment.

Automating their billing and collections process with Zuora saves Motive’ 10 minutes per invoice. Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of accounts that the company has to invoice and the result is savings of several hours per day for the collections team — time they now use to strengthen customer relationships and play a more strategic role in driving business growth. Seeman says this human connection is important to improve the experience for Motive’s subscribers.

“There is a lot of work on the front and back end of a renewal to retain customers. Zuora’s Workflow Builder helps us maximize subscription revenue and keep our customers informed and educated. Now, my collectors spend less time creating and sending statements and emails out, and more time responding to customers who reach out to us for help,” said Seeman.

Motive’s next focus is to further automate billing operations with Workflow Builder. Zuora Billing is also helping the company with creative pricing and packaging to get a stronger foothold into the enterprise and mid-market segments.

“In the same way that we help truckers focus on driving instead of paperwork, Zuora helps us focus on our customers instead of on back-end processes. If Zuora continues to support us, we can continue to improve our product and win more customers. It’s a good partnership,” says Seeman.