Five on Friday: Cloud Outages, Personalized Support, Twitch & More

In today’s Five on Friday, we share 4 steps to help you overcome a cloud outage, customers want more personalized service, top subscription companies

Five on Friday: Cloud Outages

Source: Bigstock

In today’s Five on Friday, we share 4 steps to overcoming a cloud outage, subscription companies who are hiring, Amazon’s plans to transform Twitch into an advertising channel, personalized customer support and more.

How Your SaaS Can Survive a Cloud Outage in 4 Steps

On February 28, Amazon Web Service (AWS) was down for three hours and 39 minutes due to a disruption to its S3 storage service and dozens of other services. AWS apologized and explained that the problem was caused by human error, and they would do everything possible to prevent such an incident in the future.

 Personalized Support

Source: Bigstock

Ten days after the incident, Mikita Mikado wrote a great piece, How Your SaaS Company Can Survive a Cloud Outage for CMS Wire. His company, PandaDoc, was one of the customers that was a victim of the AWS outage. Mikado offers this four-step approach to surviving a cloud outage whether at the hands of AWS or another cloud service provider:

  1. Spread the risk. Don’t rely on one service for everything, Mikado says, and make sure you have a Plan B and C in case Plan A fails.
  2. Build redundant systems. If you have a Plan B and C in place, you’ll be ready to respond in real time if needed.
  3. Back-up your data. This may seem obvious, but backing up your data is absolutely critical. This is a step that you should never skip.
  4. Test and retest your system. Don’t wait for disaster to strike to test your system. Test it regularly so you are prepared should the inevitable occur.

Read the full article on CMS Wire here.

Customers Want More Personalized Support

 Twitch & More

Source: Bigstock

According to a survey by DeviceBits, two-thirds of consumers are willing to use a self-service format for customer service, while just over one-third want to go online and search for answers to their customer service needs, reports Media Post. Unfortunately, companies are not offering those options to customers, causing a negative impact on the user experience.

“It’s clear that consumers, who have grown accustomed to self-support in a search-engine environment, now also want the customer service function of their favorite brands to follow a similar suit,” says DeviceBits CEO JC Ramey.

Some brands are providing support through social media which provides for more personalized service. This is not necessarily the case for customers who are trying to find answers on a brand’s website or online customer service portal. Ramey recommends gathering as much information about current and potential customers as possible, so a personalized approach to customer service can be offered.

Read the original article, written by Aaron Baar, on Media Post here.

Subscription Companies Who Are Hiring  (via LinkedIn)

Five on Friday: Cloud Outages

Source: LinkedIn

It is no secret that the subscription economy is booming, and companies of all sizes are hiring. Here are five top subscription jobs posted recently on LinkedIn:

Amazon, Senior Partnerships Manager, (Amazon) Prime Video International:
Become a part of Prime Video’s International Marketing team and build and executive partnership plans to attract, engage and delight Prime Video customers across the globe. You will focus on securing and growing long-term relationships with partners to help new customers sign-up for our service and leverage our third party distribution partnerships to drive promotion and awareness.

Scopely, Director of Product – Subscriptions:
Scopely, a leader in the mobile games industry, is seeking a Director of Product to lead our subscriptions business. The ideal candidate will utilize a combination of outstanding analytical skills, business acumen, and strategic thinking to manage this business across the portfolio of our top grossing games.

Dropbox, Marketing Manager, Partner Communications:
We’re looking for a marketing manager who can help us improve communication to/thru our partner ecosystem. The ideal candidate will be responsible for crafting messages and developing marketing strategy in collaboration with other marketing functions ( paid marketing, conversion marketing, etc.), building and executing campaigns on our marketing automation platforms, and measuring success through rigorous data analysis.

LinkedIn, Customer Success Manager – Enterprise Accounts:
The Customer Success Manager is part of the LinkedIn Sales Solutions organization. The objective of this role is to drive adoption of our product, LinkedIn Sales Navigator within our clients and to help our solutions become a mission critical, irreplaceable part of our clients’ sales and business development process.

Wall Street Journal, Real-Time Audience Development/Audience Analyst:
The Wall Street Journal seeks a journalist and digital strategist for a junior position on its growing Audience Development team. The role provides daily research support to the Audience Development and Analytics teams and plays a key role in increasing traffic, audience reach and subscriptions across the global newsroom.

Amazon Plans to Make Twitch Into an Advertising Channel

 Personalized Support

Source: Bigstock

In 2014, Amazon purchased Twitch, a video game live streaming platform, for $970 million in cash. Last fall it leveraged that relationship by adding Twitch Prime as a perk to Amazon Prime members. Twitch Prime members would receive a rotating selection of free digital games each month as well as in game loot, ad-free viewing, a free channel subscription every 30 days and more.

Marketing Week reports that Twitch now has more than 100 million users with 9.7 million users daily and 2 million broadcasting live videos every month. Last year active users spent an average of one hour and 46 minutes on Twitch each day. Twitch is now adding to its value – and Amazon’s bottom line – by becoming an advertising channel of sorts. Marketing Week says that Twitch has attracted top brands like Nike, Apple, Netflix and Kellogg’s to offer exclusive ads on the Twitch platform.

Steve Ford, Twitch’s VP of sales for Europe, told Marketing Week, “Twitch can be the Googlebox of live streaming. The fact we filmed an ad for Kellogg’s just for our platform shows how far we’ve come. We really believe the world’s half a billion gamers is a market we can realistically target.”

Read the full story here.

Upcoming Events: April 19 Webinar and Payment Boot Camp East

 Twitch & More

We love sharing our expertise and the experience of our favorite subject matter experts during Subscription Insider events – live and virtual! We’ve got two upcoming events you’ll want to get on your calendar:

How to Reduce Subscriber Churn in 14 Days: Free Live Webinar, April 19, 2017

Payment Boot Camp East: Day-long event in New York City, May 8, 2017

Click on the individual links above to learn more and to register now, or bookmark our Events page so you’re always up-to-date on upcoming Subscription Insider events!

 

 

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