More and more customers, particularly millennials, want to use self-serve customer portals to manage their accounts with suppliers. They don’t want to have to spend time contacting and speaking with a member of your collections team to handle their accounts when they can do it themselves in less time on a self-serve customer portal. Customers also want the flexibility to manage their accounts when and where it is convenient for them. They don’t want to be tied to their offices or regular business hours. A customer portal gives your customers the flexibility and efficiency they want and need to manage their demanding business schedules.

Documents are the perfect example of how a customer portal can give customers what they want and give your collections team a welcome respite from tedious clerical tasks. Lost or misplaced documents are frequently the reasons customers offer for not paying on time, whether it is the real situation or not.

Your collections team can needlessly waste many hours as a result of lost or misplaced documents on:

  • Collections calls made only to find that missing documents are the reason for not paying.
  • Calls or emails from customers requesting copies of documents.
  • Searching your data base for the correct missing documents.
  • Resending the missing documents by email, fax or mail.

On your customers’ end, time is spent non-productively as well:

  • Initiating payment only to put it on hold.
  • Searching desks, file cabinets and computer files for copies.
  • Fielding calls from your collectors or calling your team to get copies of missing documents.
  • Processing payment a second time.

Customer portals are the solution to the problems caused by lost or misplaced documents. A customer portal allows self-service of statements, invoices, purchase orders and bills of lading. Customers can easily access their accounts to get the documents they need when they want and from wherever they choose. And, your collection team can avoid the drudgery of clerical tasks and useless collection calls, and spend more time on important collection matters.

Most important of all, a customer portal with easy access to documents will help to accelerate your cash flow and achieve collection KPIs.

In addition to providing access to documents, customer portals can give your customers other convenient, time saving self-serve options including:

  • Easy Pay – a hyper-link connection to a credit or debit card, EFT, ACH or a fintech payment option such as PayPal.
  • Promise to Pay – records customer commitments and provides automated follow up.
  • Smart Disputes – provides line item annotation to clarify the details of a dispute.
  • Magic Link Authentication – a unique link to use in lieu of a password to easily access a customer portal.

With these convenient features and the ability to access documents a customer portal will be a win-win solution for you and your customers.

The key to successful installation of a customer 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 portal with the essential features you need.

If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from a customer portal, please contact Lockstep Collect at www.lockstep.io.