The same customer may work with different departments within the company, and have different behavior or payment methods with each of them. Inconsistency and disharmony in your internal processes can lead to confusion. Added to which, your company’s image can be tarnished in the eyes of customers by its non-collaborative practices. So how do you harmonize the sharing of knowledge and processes at the heart of a company?
Share customer knowledge to boost your processes
Securing the customer experience and identifying new business opportunities can only be achieved through sharing. By calling on your internal departments to collaborate around shared customer knowledge, you gain access to key information. Credit management and finance departments are at the heart of this data centralization, harmonizing financial relations and spreading the cash culture throughout your operations.
To improve responsiveness and speed, you need to detect customer risk. And the more sensors there are, the easier it becomes to identify risks. So we need to open up and democratize financial information. Another step is to develop cash-generating collaboration between your company’s key functions. These include sales, purchasing and supply-chain production. These functions are still articulated in different ways and, in order to federate them into an essential lever on cash flow, knowledge sharing is required.
Democratize internal collaboration to unlock opportunities
“We set up a system of collaborative tasks to send requests for various modifications (change of name, address, addition of purchase order, etc.) in our ERP to the teams concerned,” explains Thomas JAN, Data Quality and Program Coordinator for ARKADIN. He concludes: “This has enabled us to manage this type of request much more effectively, as it can now be quantified, whereas in the past it was done by email.”
By digitally transforming exchanges between departments, you gain visibility over customer information. For example, a litigation workflow can bring together the legal and logistics departments to assist in gathering this thorny data. In another example, a workflow can be created for the sole purpose of validating or rejecting a request for outstanding receivables from different departments. Digitization thus creates better visibility of outstanding amounts, unpaid invoices, disputes and business opportunities. It makes it possible to set up General Sales Conditions, General Payment Conditions, or even authorized levels of outstandings agreed between departments. The digitization of inter-departmental exchanges helps to build close customer relations, while promoting internal collaboration.
Maintain customer relations to gain a distinctive advantage
Any increase in customer proximity means shorter payment times. With the help of digitalization, far from dehumanizing, you revitalize your customer interactions. Customers have easy access to their billing data via portals. They can pay online, view their invoices or check their due dates. The emergence of artificial intelligence means that all players can focus on their core business. And the interoperability of systems between originator and payer is also helping to support this major change in companies. Closer to your customers, and more focused on value-added tasks, digital transformation can only benefit you.
The CashOnTime solution: the customer portal, a differentiating asset
“Thanks to CashOnTime‘s customer portal, we can offer our customers a self-service platform giving them real-time access to all their invoices and statements. We also offer them the possibility of communicating easily with our collection team and paying their invoices online,” explains Marina BRICENO, Information Technology-ERP Systems at GARDA. It’s a facilitating management tool that will save you time and efficiency. A conclusion shared by Marina BRICENO: “Our customers appreciate the portal’s ease of use and the productivity gains it delivers.
