Customer payment portals have become a necessity to meet collection KPIs, reduce processing and collection costs and give your customers the self-serve conveniences they want to manage their accounts. Providing a customer payment portal makes you easy to do business with. Companies that are easy to do business with get paid sooner by customers, particularly millennials, who want to manage their accounts. And, when you let your customers manage their accounts you can reduce your payment processing and collection costs.
Here are 4 must have features you should have in your customer payment portal.
Magic Link Authentication
With Magic Link authentication, instead of needing a password to access a customer payment portal, customers can simply enter an email address on the login page. Customers can review statements, download invoices and make payments from a customer payment portal without having to enter a password.
Magic Link authentication is more secure than password protection. The magic link sent to your customer is unique. It can be programmed to expire after a certain number of clicks or a period of time such as an hour. There is no need to worry about security of passwords or logins.
Magic Links can also be programmed to take customers directly to past due invoices, which can encourage customers to pay sooner.
Your AR team can also use magic link authentication to access your customer payment portal instead of needlessly spending time managing passwords and logins.
Promise to Pay
The Promise to Pay feature in a customer payment portal records customers’ payment commitments and provides automated follow up. Customers who make commitments to pay, particularly in writing, are more likely to pay as promised. If not, you have automated follow up to remind customers of their commitments.
Smart Disputes
Smart Disputes provide line item annotation to clarify the details of a dispute.
Frequently, the first time you learn of a dispute is when your customer notifies you of a charge-back and takes an unauthorized deduction from a payment, or worse yet puts a payment on hold until the dispute is resolved. With Smart Disputes you learn about disputes sooner and can notify other stakeholders to speed up resolution.
Easy Pay
With the Easy Pay feature email notifications you send your customers have a hyper-link connection to a credit or debit card, EFT, ACH or a fintech option such as PayPal. All your customers need to do is click the link to make a payment.
Easy Pay eliminates the need for manual cash application. Transactions are automated and integrated from your AR software back to your ERP platform.
Easy Pay is one click payment and automated cash application that gets your cash in the bank and on the books.
With these 4 features your customer payment portal is a win-win solution for you and your customers.
The key to the successful installation of a customer payment portal is to work with an experienced software partner.
Lockstep Collect is a market leader in cloud-based credit and collection platforms. Lockstep Collect can help you install a customer payment portal with the essential features you need.
If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from a customer payment portal, please contact Lockstep Collect at www.lockstep.io.
