Dealing With Customers ‘The Ebsco Way’

Learn how Ebsco leveraged AI and automation to improve their company’s Customer Experience in A/R

The fate of a company is largely dependent on customer relationships. With manual cash posting, the chances of poor customer experience on account of multiple cash application errors such as non-standardized remittances, inefficient cash posting, and deduction arguments. Ebsco is a diversified organization with several business units within the parent company. The company promises a diversity of customers and the transactions are done with them, which in turn, becomes a headache for a cash application analyst, being in charge of the A/R and conducting the cash application process manually.

With over 35,000 customers all around the globe, around 240,000 invoices are generated annually. The EFT reconciliation process was 100% manual which resulted in an unsatisfactory hit-rate of 20%-50% through their custom lockbox program. The reason being- a series of challenges that had a serious impact on the entire cash application process. But nevertheless, Ebsco improved its cash application with the help of automation and achieved 80% hit-rate and was able to increase resource re-allocation to higher-value functions by a 30% increase.

Key Challenges-

• Manual processing of EDIs led to additional workload
• Missing and no remittance scenarios meant ad-hoc collaboration
• Cash Posting for complex parent-child scenarios was difficult
• Manual deduction coding was error-prone

More FTEs or Automation?

Manual labor-intensive processes are deeply flawed with error-prone results. While sticking to traditional manual methods, an increase in the number of customers would result in an increase in the number of transactions and invoices. Hence, more data to process would result in a higher expenditure with time. On the other hand, the investment in automation is one time and the long term implications are beneficial. The investments made in introducing automation decreases over time with higher profits. The FTE investment would increase subsequently with time whereas the technology investment would reduce after the initial capital expenditure. Moreover, automation enabled minimal manual intervention and was a clear winner!

Key Features:

• A web aggregation engine for auto-capturing website remittances.
• Standardized templates for common customer scenarios.
• Standardized auto-cash posting for complex parent-child scenarios.
• Auto-Matching of deduction reason codes so the deductions aren’t manual.
• Auto-Cash posting for multiple formats of remittances.

By implementing the above features, the manual efforts invested in the cash application process reduced greatly, making it free from errors.

“We had a really good cash application process in place with different process improvement consultants helping us out. But HighRadius has the Cash Application cloud that goes beyond what the banks & traditional ERP programs do to support faster payment processing.” -Carolyn Ebtress, Director of A/R, Ebsco Information Services

Artificial Intelligence is not just a mere technological upgrade, but it is turning into a go-to for handling transactions and payment processes. Leveraging AI could ensure scalability in more ways than one in the near future by:

• Accurate remittance capture and data identification
• Intelligent invoice mapping for unstructured data
• Auto-Resolution of repetitive exceptions due to pattern analysis
• Auto Triggered Emails to Customers

It’s time to let go of the traditional methods, switch to automation and make it hassle-free and efficient like never before.