Providing excellent customer service is a priority for any relationship-centric business. As in many sectors of life, a lot goes on behind the scenes to create the robust support and service that makes people feel compelled to stick around.
In my previous articles exploring the role of payments in functional order-to-cash (O2C) or source-to-pay (S2P) processes, we considered how payment solutions mirror certain aspects of agrarian growth and development. Numerous actors, supplies and equipment are required to ensure a healthy crop; just cooperative departments and processes are necessary for a thriving business. One of those, integrated supplier payments, improves business operations and opens the door for greater collaboration and success amongst buyers, suppliers and customers alike. Much like irrigation, proper equipment and a diverse supplier pool can lead to a phenomenal crop.
Today, I’d like to look at the importance of integrated payments on the customer side. Integrated payments provide better customer service by offering customers flexibility, privacy, efficiency and accessibility. When integrated with excellent back-end business operations, an integrated customer payment system strengthens the business as a whole and creates more space (and time!) for authentic relationships — not unlike the exchange of harvested goods at a weekend farmer’s market following a successful growing season.
Keep things simple and trust people to do their share
Integrated customer payments simplify changing payment preferences and optimize payment-related processes while nurturing the customer relationship. The ideal system is able to gather customer payments online via customer portals and then match them in the ERP against corresponding invoices, removing the need to shift between systems to keep track of invoices and customer activity.
While payment integration simplifies things on the supplier side, a comprehensive payment integration system offers customers a wide range of payment options, too. For example, customers can schedule or auto-pay their invoices online, streamlining the experience by removing cumbersome and time-consuming steps. This ease of use is accompanied by a sense of security, privacy and control, something customers highly value in an ever-evolving landscape of payment modalities and risk mitigation requirements.
Think of it as a produce co-op, where members of a community pay a certain amount each month in return for seasonal farm goods. The member can choose how much they pay, if they’d prefer to pick up or have the produce delivered and how they might want to use coupons or referral codes.
Flexibility supports accountability
Customer portals — also known as Electronic Invoice Presentment Portal (EIPP) — can offer a wide variety of payment options that make it easier for customers to pay in the ways that are most efficient for them. Some of those options include:
- Global payment capabilities: This solution embeds payment into the customer experience by allowing them to pay their invoices online in their local currency rather than the currency used by the invoice issuer.
- Lockbox automation: Automating the process of managing bank lockbox files saves AR teams a huge amount of time and eliminates the potential for errors that could negatively impact customers. AI software can now automate the manually intensive process of matching payments received from all incoming payment information sources. Receipts can be collected and applied seamlessly across all forms of payments (check, ACH, virtual card). This increased automation frees teams up to attend to higher-level tasks, including customer engagement.
- Discounts for early payment: Another win-win proposition, integrated payment systems allow customers to schedule automatic invoice payments in response to supplier requests and special offers. For example, a supplier might propose early payment discounts. By making the process easy, customers are more likely to take advantage of it. The customer pays less, the supplier improves their cashflow by getting paid earlier and nobody feels like they’re racing against deadlines. In the farming world, this is not unlike giving customers the option to volunteer in the gardens in exchange for discounted produce or some other mutually beneficial arrangement.
A place at the table for everyone: why mutuality and trust are the core of a functioning payment process
The customer experience should be a key driver for investing in payments technology, because businesses know customers will no longer settle for relationships that feel purely transactional. Just like people want to know their food is organic and eco-conscious, customers want to know that the companies they work with have their well-being in mind — and that includes making the payment process clean, simple and flexible.
A business can have the most sophisticated back-end business operations imaginable, but if the customer’s payment experience is poor, any success will be short-lived. Investing in technology that facilitates customer payments is sure to prove a wise choice, as it prioritizes mutual benefit over quarterly reports or quick wins. This long-view, “everyone wins” approach yields healthy business relationships based on trust and goodwill — not to mention a healthier cashflow — and is sure to see companies who adopt it through many a season, with an abundant harvest to show for it.
