Most A/R teams in the CPG Industry don’t have customer experience as one of their KPIs, so they deprioritize it. Instead, they believe it is something that forward-looking functions such as sales and marketing need to worry about.
Right from submitting a credit application to making payments and resolving deductions, there are multiple points when the customer is directly in touch with the A/R department. How the team handles situations that directly involve customers impacts their experience and can make or break a potential long-term business relationship.
A/R leaders should provide organizational incentives to their teams for ensuring a good customer experience. They should effectively communicate the importance of customer satisfaction across the organization and hold their teams accountable for improving customer service.
All customers are different, and the same billing, collections, and payments strategies don’t work for everyone. A/R executives must ensure their team spends sufficient time understanding customer expectations. They can then create targeted strategies for each customer segment to deliver exemplary service.
Realizing customer needs will help the A/R teams to reach a settlement that keeps both the business and the customer’s interests in consideration. This would ensure the team can create healthier relationships with customers and do business with them for longer. Listed below are a few questions A/R teams should ask to deliver a better experience:
There might be several occasions where the team is not able to meet customer expectations. This makes it critical to receive customer feedback and share it with the team in real-time to make course corrections accordingly.
For instance, a CPG-company customer raises a dispute claiming the shipment they received has some goods missing. Having this visibility in real-time will enable the team to perform a root-cause analysis using the available data and make well-informed decisions to resolve the claim faster.
Improving customer experience is not a one-time activity – it is a continuous, long-term process. Therefore, a/R leaders must adopt a centralized system that enables a 360-degree view of customer performance across the teams. Doing so would eliminate silos and ensure there is information flowing across teams so they can proactively work on customer feedback to the customer retention rate.
A/R leaders should have digitization as one of their top priorities in 2022. It is imperative to empower the teams with technology that allows them to drive exceptional customer experience. Based on the insights gathered from Mike Thelen, below are five ways automation helps improve customer experience in A/R:
CFOs and finance leaders from the CPG industry must consider customer experience to be on their 2022 agenda if they want an optimized cash flow. A/R leaders should work with their teams on the points mentioned above to ensure exceptional customer service.
To achieve that, A/R leaders need to ensure their teams have a 360-degree view of customer performance. Discover how five A/R leaders built their technology stack to provide customer delight.
HighRadius Integrated Receivables Software Platform is the world’s only end-to-end accounts receivable software platform to lower DSO and bad-debt, automate cash posting, speed-up collections, and dispute resolution, and improve team productivity. It leverages RivanaTM Artificial Intelligence for Accounts Receivable to convert receivables faster and more effectively by using machine learning for accurate decision making across both credit and receivable processes and also enables suppliers to digitally connect with buyers via the radiusOneTM network, closing the loop from the supplier accounts receivable process to the buyer accounts payable process. Integrated Receivables have been divided into 6 distinct applications: Credit Software, EIPP Software, Cash Application Software, Deductions Software, Collections Software, and ERP Payment Gateway – covering the entire gamut of credit-to-cash.