Automation Case Study: Subscription Service Customer Management Automation Case Study
Many business owners and employees running subscription-based businesses share similar concerns.
From managing customer information, sending notification messages, and checking subscription periods — all processes are handled manually through Google Sheets or KakaoTalk, and the workload snowballs over time.
The more manual work there is, the more human errors inevitably occur.
Sometimes subscription end dates are missed, essential customer information is omitted or incorrectly entered, leading to awkward moments when customers complain. Many of you reading this can probably relate.
Company M, the client in today's automation case study, was experiencing exactly the same problems and under significant stress.
Company M had a setup where, whenever customers signed up for services through the Imweb platform, a staff member would manually copy payment information from Toss Payments and paste it into an Excel file.
Each piece of information — subscriber name, phone number, initial subscription date, end date — was critical, making it extremely tricky to transfer everything without mistakes.
During peak workload periods, some information inevitably ended up missing or incorrectly entered.
The daily 7:00 AM messages sent to individual customers also required staff to carve out separate time, and the afternoon process of sending "ritual completion" messages to expiring subscribers was also handled entirely by hand.
"As the number of subscribers grows, repetitive tasks can no longer be handled by individual employee capabilities alone. Moreover, when human errors occur, they directly impact service quality."
After facing these practical challenges, they came to us, and we built a solution using the no-code tools MAKE and Airtable.
Customer Management Automation Workflow Revealed
Here's the workflow we built to automate the entire process from customer information storage to message delivery.
[3-Step Subscription Automation Workflow Built with MAKE and Airtable]
- Automatic Customer Information Storage on Order
When a customer subscribes and completes payment through Toss Payments, order information is generated.
At this point, the MAKE scenario immediately receives the order data, extracts the customer's name, phone number, subscription start and end dates, and inputs them into the Airtable database in real-time.
2. Update Imweb token usage.
3. Fetch customer information data from Imweb payment.
4. Add new users to database.
5. Send purchase completion notification to paying customers.
- Personalized Notification Auto-Sending
Now that the customer list is properly stored in Airtable, every morning at 7:00 AM, MAKE pulls from the database and automatically sends notification messages with individual links to each customer.
- Subscription End Date Ritual Completion Notification Auto-Sending
Every evening, MAKE again filters Airtable for customers whose "subscription end date is today" and automatically sends ritual completion messages.
A Much More Comfortable Situation
- No more need for anyone to be glued to the keyboard for everything
- Staff no longer need to come in early or sacrifice their morning hours
- Customers know exactly when their subscription ends and can more easily connect to subscription renewals or re-subscriptions!
So What Was Actually Gained?
From Company M staff's perspective, the work that used to take at least 1 hour per day has completely disappeared, resulting in approximately 520 hours of repetitive work eliminated annually.
Converted to monetary value, this translates to savings of 5,215,600 KRW per year.
The MAKE subscription costs approximately 146,657 KRW per year (subject to exchange rate fluctuations), and Airtable's free plan was sufficient, so there was no additional cost. Compared to the costs consumed by manual work, only 2.7% of the original cost was needed, saving 97.3% in time and expenses.
Beyond mere money and time savings, what's most meaningful — like Company M — is that through workflow automation, team members were freed from tedious repetitive work and could create an environment where they can truly focus on what matters: receiving customer feedback and planning new services.
For solo entrepreneurs or startups, automating these simple tasks to invest more time in productive, creative work is an essential element for business growth.
Is some of your day being consumed by simple repetitive tasks like these?
Save time, money, and most importantly, yourself —
and focus your time and energy on work that truly creates value.
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