If you're having trouble creating pleasant, seamless customers experiences (CX) and you're not all on your own. Within North American companies, 75 percent of respondents have CX as their most important strategic performance indicator; however, only 16 percent believe they're capable of providing excellent CX, according to a Dimension Data industry study. There are many aspects that make up outstanding customer service; however, at the top of the CX priorities is billing. This includes invoices, payment collection as well as all inquiries from customers in connection with these functions.
Although businesses may try to make positive experiences for customers around billing, they usually fail. The reason for this is usually an old, back-of-house ERP (enterprise resource management) or similar financial management software that's not built to handle the modern CX. They're often ineffective at creating seamless payment options for customers that allow customers to access an online self-service portal to view their status on payments, as well as letting the customer service team access and examine customer billing information. They also don't do a great job in controlling recurring revenue operations properly and properly applying discounts. This means that the billing CX customer experience is impacted. Customers aren't able to select the payment options or settings they prefer, and billing errors can result in unhappy, frustrated customers.
Fortunately, these flaws can be fixed by the integration of Salesforce Billing with your existing ERP. Salesforce Billing is designed from scratch to provide polished, quality, professional CX that customers demand from their transactions with their billing. It's not just that Salesforce Billing seamlessly draws on extensive customer information from your company's Salesforce CRM system and provides a seamless interface to the CRM system, but Salesforce Billing also offers a modern CX that can be used to replace cumbersome and inefficient billing workflows that are traditionally controlled through your ERP. Let's look at four advantages of connecting Salesforce Billing with your ERP:
Pay faster Many businesses experience delays when paying invoices as a result of poor workflows. Maybe their ERP can't produce invoices with accuracy or in the form of logical batches. Perhaps the payment collection process is happening later in the lifecycle of sales transactions as it is supposed to be. In all these cases, Salesforce Billing is the solution. Salesforce Billing supports Dunning collection procedures that are the top-of-the-line payment collection method. Utilizing easily-configurable Dunning procedures, Salesforce Billing can automatically manage tasks like paying past due invoice balances or creating invoice batches that incorporate collections, write-offs treatments, and late fees. Salesforce Billing comes with tools that help businesses comprehend invoice information, for example, a time-based view of the amount of an account. In the end, the ability to collect payments more efficiently and quickly allows businesses to be paid more quickly.
Eliminate billing discrepancies The older ERPs typically struggle to manage complex billing processes like periodic payments and payment schedules, credit, and discounts. The problems get worse when the ERP uses information directly from Salesforce CRM to complete billing-related tasks, like the creation of invoices. The reason for these issues is usually a misalignment of the CRM's data and the products related to billing that the ERP creates using the CRM data. Salesforce Billing can take over management of some or all these key billing functions--invoicing, payment collection, and even revenue recognition and accounting--eliminating the possibility of misalignment. Importantly, Salesforce Billing can seamlessly transfer financial information into the ERP for general-ledger posting as well as other activities related to financial management. Enroll for Salesforce billing training online today and learn more.
Increase access to transactional data for sales Traditional ERPs are usually used only for finance departments. This is because these ERPs typically aren't made to let other teams, such as fulfillment, sales, and customer service, quickly access data, analyze, and modify the financial records of customers. This means that the information about sales transactions inside ERPs isn't readily available to the teams who need it to fulfill orders and address customer concerns regarding these orders. Salesforce Billing offers an easy-to-use method for non-finance personnel within the company to easily access data on sales transactions. This improved access means that more teams are equipped to provide efficient service to customers.
Offer customers more options to pay A lot of ERPs provide a limited number of strict payment options for payments. Salesforce Billing allows customers to pay the way they like regardless of whether they pay with the use of ACH or credit cards, by one-time payment, or a pre-planned payment. With the ability to give customers the maximum flexibility, they tend to make payments on time, in full, and without having to ask the business to issue reminders or tack on late charges. This is what makes Salesforce Billing a win-win proposition for both the business as well as the customer.
Salesforce Billing provides the tool that will improve, streamline, and improve the workflows of your ERP. Through the integration of Salesforce Billing with your ERP, it will allow you to make payments faster as well as eliminate billing discrepancies errors that require a lot of resources to fix, provide more departments in your organization access to the sales transaction information and offer customers with more flexible and convenient ways that customers can pay the bill.
Simplus is able to help companies make the most of a Salesforce-ERP integration. To find out what Simplus assisted a computer software business to eliminate silos from its sales process and build an operational environment that is more integrated, take a look at the Simplus report of the Cura business.
If you're interested in integrating Salesforce Billing into your ERP system, get in touch with the experts in implementation Simplus. Simple. We're excited to assist you in gaining maximum benefit out of both platforms.