The Opportunity for Change
Organisations can reduce their day's sales outstanding (DSO) by up to 30% whilst lowering the costs of their payments and collections function by up to 60% by changing their focus from the payment to the end-to-end process the payment is part of.
Many organisations treat payments as a functional silo and build the capability to manage how they will react when something goes wrong. By looking at the process more holistically and by incorporating the principles of customer service design, organisations can quickly turn a problem into a unique and sustainable point of differentiation.
This document describes the traditional approach to payments, the issues, and the impact on the business. It also discusses what good looks like and how to achieve it. It provides an overview of:​
The traditional payment approach,
Identifies associated challenges,
Examines their impact on business operations, and most importantly,
Explores best practices and strategies to achieve optimal outcomes in payment processes.
What payments and collections function are we referring to?
Any organisation that provides a service that is paid for via a regular payment arrangement using direct debits, credit cards, or other options, needs to manage a variety of different processes related to payments along the customer journey. At a high level, these look like:
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Onboarding of the customer and the establishment of the initial payment facility
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Ongoing communications as part of a service strategy – change of details, change of service offered, cross-sell, upsell.
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Significant event management – these will vary per industry. For Utilities – service activation, outages, late fees, payment disputes. For Insurance, the claims process.
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Collections - the process to recoup outstanding payments when things go wrong and the payment arrangement fails. For example – insufficient funds or credit card expiry. This is often accompanied by a process of reinstatement to ensure the continuation of service.
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Customer Insights
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Renewals, Annual Statements, Service Summaries etc.
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A holistic view of the customer lifecycle through a payment lens
The process and issues begin when onboarding a new customer
For many organisations, the payments and collections process begins with a payment failure, when the collections’ function reacts to retrieve that lost payment. They develop in-house capability or outsource to a third-party provider, either way, when you look at the process, it does not begin at the failure point, it begins with new customer onboarding when the initial payment arrangement is established.
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Unfortunately, even as we head with great speed and anticipation into the age of Artificial Intelligence, many organisations have not digitised nor automated the onboarding process to provide the customer with a simple and frictionless experience, notwithstanding the operational benefits that come with straight-through processing.
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They still rely on paper-based or static online forms for data capture and suffer completely avoidable events such as customer dropouts and high rejection rates by putting unnecessary friction into a process. With paper and online forms that are not “smart”, customers make errors and sometimes leave critical data fields blank creating onboarding failures. Customers also drop out when they discover the options provided to them to establish a payment arrangement do not suit their preferences.
The problem for the customer
We live in a world where incidents of spamming, data breaches, and bad actors attempting to scam us have heightened our natural suspicions and changed the way we behave to everyday situations that involve the handing over of our identity details and payment details.
Payments and collections provide the perfect example. Almost all of us have received that unexpected text message or phone call, from an unverified source, who proceeds to advise that a payment has been missed and monies are owed. To fix it requires me to provide my name, address, and date of birth to that unverified source to prove who I am to proceed. Not surprisingly these often fail.
What happens next varies by service provider. This can vary from a letter (or number of letters), further calls, and texts advising how to pay, with many directing customers to their customer portal to update details or call back on the 1800 number.
Frustration with the process can build to a breaking point
People who are not going to pay won't for their reasons but for those who want to – for those who try, callbacks are often met with lengthy call queues.
When patience runs out the call is terminated. Another failure.
As for the self-service approach, many customers don’t engage with their service providers until something goes wrong. As such many can't remember their username and passwords and can't be bothered going through a password reset as it's just another barrier and potential ordeal. The letters, emails, and SMS keep on coming and the customer is now in a loop of failure with no clear path to get out of it despite trying.
Why is it so hard for the Service Provider?
Service providers often focus on the payment, not the process that the payment sits within, ignoring solving the problem for the customer and the contact centre agent doing their job. The function tends to operate in a silo as compared to intersecting with various other departments, including sales, customer service, finance, compliance, and IT.
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These organisations are often hamstrung by:
Legacy technology limitations – technical debt
Limitations in the capability of 3rd party suppliers (payment not process)
Lack of process integration with the customer experience and service design
Compliance challenges
Data integration and analytics
What does good look like?
Solve the problem for the customer
Allow them to pay via any payment method, on any channel (including print), on any device, at any time, and provide those options at the beginning of the customer journey (onboarding) and throughout the customer lifecycle.
Solve the problem from the contact centre agents
Go Digital and implement an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) payment capability to reduce the volume of calls on the agents.
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When a contact centre agent is involved, put the same technology used to solve the problem for the customer in their hands. Help the customer to be able to pay via any payment method, on any device, over any channel (including print) at any time in a manner that the trust.
INTRODUCING:
Upwire - Payment and Collection
Upwire uniquely solves the challenges and issues associated with payments and collections by providing a platform that combines payments and collections with digital communications to provide organisations with an integrated capability. Unlike most of the solutions available today, Upwire solves payment problems by solving for both the customer and the agent.
From intelligent forms to support the onboarding process through both IVR and Agent Assist, Upwire makes it easy for the customer and the agent alike. Based on their patented NanoSite technology, Upwire provides the ability for customers to pay via any method, channel, or device at any time.
For contact centre agents, Upwire provides the ability to create real-time invoices that can be sent to a customer whilst on the call, prepopulated with customer data in a PCI DSS Compliant manner for what can be a one-click successful payment.
As the solution is a digital communications platform, it helps align the payments and collections function to your enterprise growth, service, product, and digital strategies as NanoSites are not restricted to the payment process. Including password resets, cross-sell/upsell, service outage notification, the list is endless.
It can be implemented in days, extend and enhance existing investments, and take PCI Compliance out of scope.
Any channel, anywhere, any device, any payment method - anytime
A selection of mobile payment examples
THE BUSINESS BENEFITS
The business benefits are quantifiable in terms of financial measures, in addition to positively impacting many contact centre operational metrics.
Increase Cash Flow by 60%
Making it simple at every step of the process makes it easier to make payments and manage collections. Job done.
Reduce Costs by 30%
Reducing the time, effort, and complexity whilst increasing how effective you are increases productivity and lowers costs.
Enhance Customer Convenience
Empower your customers to interact via their channel of choice, at a time that suits them, for frictionless results. Positive payment resolutions increase, as does customer satisfaction. Win-win.
Make it Multi-channel
Deliver messages or trigger interactions by email, SMS, IVR voice, messaging apps or even QR code. Communicate with customers across multiple channels seamlessly to maximise response.
Time it Right
Build automated communication workflows that contact customers before they default, or as soon as a payment failure occurs. Time your messages and content to match business requirements and optimise outcomes.
Support Self-service
Enable customers to serve themselves – with dynamically personalised NanoSites. Take full payments, part payments or negotiate terms (within your chosen parameters) – all without requiring an agent.
Extend and Enhance
Existing Investments
Upwire can be your complete payments solution or where necessary, complement your existing investments and take them to the next level. It’s entirely up to you!
PCI DSS Compliance
You can now take payments and collections out of your compliance scope.
Up and running in days
Enjoy the benefits without the pain of an elongated extended complex technical implementation. The perfect solution to test and learn.
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