Ace Customer Experience With a Robust Accounts Receivable Process
This post was originally written on the Chargebee blog.
I’ve not received the invoice. How do you expect me to pay?”
“My team has made the payment. Can you check?”
“The payment failed again? It’s frustrating to keep retrying. What’s the issue?”
“Can you send me the invoice again? I’ll make the payment then.”
If you’re not solving for such back and forth between your collections team and customers, you’re risking hampering customer relationships. And, driving away customers faster than you think.
PWC reports that 1 in 3 customers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. 🤯
Read on to know how you can build an Accounts Receivable (AR) process that not only helps you get paid faster but boost a positive customer experience.
Contextual Customer Engagement: Your Dark Horse in AR
Ask any sales or marketing leader the secret of selling, and they’ll tell you it’s personalised contextual engagement.
Reaching the right set of customers at the right time with the right message can help you win the deal.
While that’s true when you’re selling to a customer for the first time, it holds true when you’re collecting money for repeat sales too.
Misidentifying the correct paying authority, and failing to follow up without providing more context or information on the invoice generated, often lead to operational delays or discontentment amongst customers, leading to subpar customer experience or involuntary churn at worst.
Hence, the boring, robotic age-old payment follow-ups just won’t do the trick. You must build a personalized collection experience to ensure you get paid on time.
Sadly, most companies fail before they even begin. That’s mainly because they assume they can’t influence the speed of collections since it’s all in the hands of their customers.
Well, it’s not. Let’s dive deep into how you can leverage effective communication to prevent playing catch-up for your own IOUs and ensure a superior customer experience.
Understand your customer
Start segmenting your customers into cohorts based on various factors like
- Invoice amount
- Subscription plans
- Payment behaviors
- Credit risk
- Business size
- Industry
- Location
This segmentation will go a long way in helping you build a personalised communication experience which is the backbone of better customer relationships.
Build targeted campaigns
If you’ve understood your customers and their payment behaviors — you’ve won half the battle. Now, you need to map out the communication stages (before, on, and after the invoice due date), and messages for every customer.
If you’re using the same templatized message and mode of communication for all the cohorts., it probably won’t work as:
- Large corporations are process-intensive and require rigorous approvals from top management. So you must follow their invoicing and documentation guidelines to ensure your money isn’t stuck in approvals. On the other hand, with small-medium businesses, you might be able to reach out directly to the customer much faster.
- The no. of follow-ups and tone of communication would change according to the payment behavior and invoice value too:
- – Minimal/ No risk customers who have low invoice value but always pay on time might just need one gentle payment reminder
– Medium-risk customers who have medium-high invoice value customers that generally pay on time might need 2–3 personalized payment reminders from the collector
– High-Risk customers with high invoice value and hardly pay on time, even with constant reminders might need AMs or CSM’s engagement post a couple of follow-up email reminders
Pro Tip: For a seamless payment experience, give customers the flexibility to make advance payments and offer multiple payment methods. Additionally, embed your reminders with payment links for quick payments.
For complete article, please visit Chargebee blog.
