The cancellation letter nobody expected
An email arrives from a customer you have looked after for years: a notice to cancel all services at the end of their term, with a port-out request already on its way from a competitor. You check the account. The mobile contract ended four months ago and has been rolling monthly. The broadband renewed quietly last year. The hosted phone seats were added in stages, so they end on three different dates.
Nobody called them. Not because the account manager did not care, but because the end dates were in a spreadsheet that was last updated when the person who built it left, and the billing platform shows what to charge, not when a term finishes.
Meanwhile a competitor rang the finance director, offered a new handset refresh and a lower monthly price, and did the thinking for them.
Why one customer has many end dates
In most reseller businesses the renewal problem is not a lack of effort. It is that the unit you sell (a customer) is not the unit that expires (a service).
- Each service has its own start date, which is usually the live date, not the order date.
- Add-ons and extra users are sometimes co-terminous with the main contract and sometimes start their own term, depending on how they were sold.
- Your term with the customer and your supplier's term behind it may not line up, so you can end up tied to a cost after the customer has gone.
- Notice periods and auto-renewal wording differ between your older and newer terms and conditions.
- Mobile upgrades and handset refreshes run on their own cycle and are a renewal trigger in themselves.
Put that across a few hundred customers and the spreadsheet cannot keep up. So renewals get worked from memory, and memory favours the biggest accounts.
The cost of letting contracts roll
A contract that rolls monthly is not lost yet, but it is exposed. The customer can leave on short notice, and they are exactly the customer a competitor's outbound team is looking for.
| Missed step | Consequence |
|---|---|
| End date not known | Customer approached by a competitor first |
| Supplier term not matched | You keep paying for a service the customer ceased |
| Handset refresh not offered | Upgrade revenue and a new term both lost |
| Price review not done | Legacy margin left on an old tariff |
| Renewal signed but not recorded | Next year's end date is wrong again |
There is also a quieter cost. Account managers spend time on customers who are mid-term and happy, while the ones about to become free agents get no attention at all.
A renewal register built from your own data
- We pull every live service from your billing platform and CRM, with its start date, term length, product and the supplier behind it.
- Where the data is missing or unclear (and some of it will be), the service goes into a review queue for your team to confirm once, rather than being guessed.
- For each service the register works out the end date, the notice window under the terms that customer signed, and the supplier's own end date behind it.
- Services are rolled up to the customer, so the account manager sees the whole picture: what ends when, and which services could be brought onto a single date at renewal.
- Renewals appear in the account manager's CRM tasks at the point you choose, with the current spend, products and handset ages ready for the conversation.
- When a renewal is signed, the new term is written back, so the register stays right without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet.
We keep the rules (how long before an end date to start, which products count as co-terminous) in settings your team can change, because your terms change over time.
How renewals feel once it is running
Each account manager starts the week with a short list: customers entering their renewal window, customers already rolling, and customers with a supplier term ending ahead of their own. The conversation starts on your timetable rather than the competitor's.
Directors get a view of contracted revenue by end month, which is something most resellers can only estimate. And when you consider buying another reseller's base, the same register tells you what you are actually buying.
Signs this is costing you now
- Contract end dates are kept in a spreadsheet, or not kept at all.
- Customers on rolling monthly terms are found by accident.
- You have paid a supplier for a service after the customer left.
- Account managers cannot say which of their customers are out of term.
- Renewals are signed but the new end date is never recorded.