The traditional order to cash process uses manual methods to complete the workflows. While manual methods may work well till the time your customer base is small, as your business grows your analysts may find it difficult to cope with the growing complexity of order to cash operations using traditional methods alone.
Let’s take a look at how we can optimize the order to cash process to strengthen cash flow, enhance customer experience, and enable your employees to focus on high-value tasks.
Digital transformation
Automate the workflows
Digitizing processes is the new normal and a necessity for businesses to survive and thrive. Companies are adopting technological solutions to increase their efficiency and garner a competitive edge. With the help of automation, businesses are able to streamline their processes and eliminate manual intervention to a large extent. This enables employees to focus on higher-end critical tasks.
Standardize processes
Bigger the team, more crucial it is to have a structured workflow in place. Consistent communication using well established processes and defined policies reduce silos and make your operations smooth. Documenting tasks and actions along with a well collated repository of associated data can support analytics initiatives and improve inter-team collaboration. .
Often, different departments utilize different CRM systems, which makes it difficult for the employees to access and collate data at one place and in one format. Such hurdles increase data silos and affect the company’s efficiency. Use APIs and software solutions that can integrate with each other to ensure easy and quick data access to all relevant stakeholders.
Ensure data accuracy consistency with centralized data repository
With automation set in place, businesses can also set up a centralized data repository, and make data accessible to employees with the necessary permissions. Thus, at any given point of time, all authorized employees can access the data. Since data entry and extraction is entirely automated, the possibility of erroneous, redundant, or missing data dials down to null.
Teams using different CRM systems can make sure that their data is up-to-date at all times using a central data repository. Automated notifications can be used to notify employees of any data updates to the repository.
Optimizing customer service
Avoid automated response systems:
Many businesses tend to cut costs by automating their customer service. This may help save money, however it can jeopardize your customer relationships. Chatbots or IVR(Interactive Voice Response) can help in resolving low-level queries such as— invoices, pay due dates, credit scores and so. Although such automated messaging can be made available 24/7, they are not efficient in resolving high-end queries. For every higher-end query the customer is redirected to a representative, thus creating multiple iterations for resolution. Placing chatbots or IVR may also put off the customers if they do not receive any significant response/solution out of that conversation.
Going with a more personalized approach although, can help businesses in getting customer loyalty and at the same time will also ensure faster receivables. This process can significantly increase the expenses however for high dollar value accounts, it is utmost necessary to resolve the issues as soon as possible, before the account gets overdue.
Automate customer onboarding:
Credit risk assessment can take a lot of time when done manually. It also adds the risk of offering higher credit limits to risky customers and losing out on potentially low risk customers due to missing or wrong data entries. Thus for faster and accurate credit assessments, it is advisable to automate the entire credit risk management process including data aggregation through third-party sources, risk-based limit allocation, and customer onboarding.
