World-Class organizations have a different approach to contacting customers and measuring performance. Traditional productivity metrics such as a low number of touch-points isn’t usually the main priority of world-leading Accounts Receivable and Order-to-Cash departments.
We often assume a high productivity measure is a good thing. But why in collections is it good to have more contact points?
Bryan DeGraw of the Hackett Group explained this key metric in a recent webinar.
You may think that world-class organizations, who are doing everything right have their customers pay on time, and they don’t have to call them and email them all the time.
However, for certain groups of customers it might be a good idea to give them more than one touch.
The dynamics of the collection role has changed. Not all of those touches are what we think of as a traditional “Hey, you need to pay me now” type of touch those proactive ones. And the strategic, approach to it is many times more of a customer service experience touchpoint.
A customer service call from the collections team might sound like
“I’m checking to see if product or service has been delivered, the invoice has been delivered. And I'm just giving you a friendly call to make sure that everything is as expected. I want to see if you're happy with the service and to confirm the product matches what you've ordered.”
An additional touch looks more like a customer service call, and on occasion may identify maybe something wasn't correct, and it's an opportunity to make that correct well in advance of an invoice being due, or going past due.
World-class organizations segment the customer base
You should know which of your customers are good payers, average payers, or poor payers. You also need to align based on the amount of business we do with them. Based on these two factors, you should segment them and touch them differently.
In your payment strategy, you’ll want to look at how you will work and communicate with a poor payer that does a lot of business with us. You want them to pay on time. So, you need to be able to touch them in a different way than we would touch, a good payer
World Class organizations segment their audience and have a contact strategy for each segment
For a 4 minute clip on segmentation view this video or watch the full webinar here. And read more about AR KPIs here
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