Learn, Adapt, Win: NLZIET's Formula for Winning the Dutch Media Industry

Founded in 2014, NLZIET is a pioneering Dutch streaming service that offers a comprehensive collection of television shows from various popular channels. Designed to provide a seamless viewing experience, NLZIET combines content from NPO, RTL, Talpa, and other media companies, allowing users to access a wide range of programs in one place. With NLZIET, subscribers can watch their favorite TV shows, series, documentaries, and movies live or on demand.

The Challenge

NLZIET encountered significant challenges in managing its subscription billing through its in-house solution. Although the system initially provided flexibility and control, it presented several obstacles as the organization scaled.

• Impact on core product focus: The engineering team at NLZIET invested considerable time and effort into constructing and maintaining the billing engine. Unfortunately, this sometimes impeded their ability to fully devote themselves to developing the core product. The need to prioritize the roadmap for enhancing the billing system's scalability diverted their attention from their primary responsibilities.

• Inherent risks with bloated codebase: Handling complex subscription scenarios, such as subscriber onboarding, proration, and renewals, within their custom-built system became increasingly challenging. Ensuring precise controls and maintaining accuracy became crucial, as any errors or mistakes in the system could have adverse consequences, including incorrect customer charges, which could damage the company's reputation and revenue.

When NLZIET wanted to roll out new pricing & packaging and introduce add-ons to grow revenue, the team led by CTO Sander Kouwenhoven started evaluating bespoke subscription and revenue management tools.

The Solution

Sander and the team wanted a system that could help them implement pricing & packaging strategies quickly while providing a localized subscription experience for their customers. After evaluating various vendors, including Recurly, they ultimately selected Chargebee. Here's how their digital transformation unfolded across different aspects.

• Automated subscription engine: Chargebee met NLZIET's needs with built-in support for complex billing scenarios, flexible proration handling, and localization. Automating subscription lifecycle operations freed the engineering team from billing responsibilities while improving accuracy.

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• Localized payment collection with Adyen: The seamless integration between Chargebee and Adyen has proven highly successful for NLZIET. The team leveraged Chargebee for payment communication without custom coding, enhancing flexibility and convenience. This integration enables NLZIET to collect customer payment information effortlessly, automatically charge them after the trial period, and handle renewals with precision and efficiency.

"Chargebee's integration with Adyen enables seamless collection of SEPA and iDEAL payments, vital for our success in the Dutch market. It eliminates the requirement of custom API integrations by directly communicating customer and payment data with Adyen."

Sander Kouwenhoven, CTO, NLZIET

• Unlocking expansion revenue with add-ons: NLZIET constantly experiments and improves its bottom-line growth through flexible plans and add-ons while allowing customers to customize their subscriptions based on preferences. "Allowing customers to switch plans or purchase add-ons at their convenience is paramount to success, especially for B2C companies like ours. Chargebee facilitated this by handling proration calculations automatically and efficiently in the background," he added.

The Impact

• Revenue growth with confidence: With a masterful blend of customer experience, binge-worthy shows, and operational rigor, NLZIET recorded a 30-40% YoY revenue over the last three years.

• Time savings and improved efficiency: By implementing Chargebee and transitioning from their in-house system, NLZIET experienced substantial time savings of 1200 hours annually. This translates to a remarkable 30% boost in efficiency for their engineering team.

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• Seamless customer journeys with Adyen: Since transitioning to the financial technology platform Adyen, NLZIET saw an uplift in Authorization Rates (achieving +98%) through the seamless integration with Chargebee and Adyen's smart retry technology. This drives a significant reduction in revenue loss and improved cost efficiency.