When you’re sending emails manually, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for customer service. Believe it or not, accounts receivable professionals are also customer service professionals. If a customer feels like the payment process is difficult or they dread calling in to pay an invoice, you have a big problem. Customers are going to put off paying, affecting your cash flow. The accounts receivable department should be practicing the best customer service tactics in order to collecting on invoices as early as possible.
Customer service in a department where customers seem to be actively avoiding your calls can seem difficult. However, using automated email can bridge the gap with your customers and help them to be more proactive with payments. Here’s how automated email can help with your customer service.
- Create Relationships
When you’re creating manual emails to send to customers to collect payment, the last thing you have time for is to send welcome emails. You can barely keep up with payment reminders, let alone an email that isn’t entirely necessary. However, welcome emails can have a huge impact on how quickly your new customer will pay. When you are using automated email, you can ensure that each month every new customer will receive an email introducing yourself, reiterating your collections policy and reminding them to look out for an invoice. Customers will feel a greater obligation to pay upcoming invoices to your company than the one they haven’t heard from yet. - Payment Reminders
Customers get busy. After all, you’re not the only company that they are paying invoices to. Sending payment reminders to customers periodically will help them to remember and help them to pay on time. Most customers do not want to miss a payment, so they will be thankful for your payment reminder, especially if your company institutes a late fee. Using automated email to send payment reminders is easy and can be set up to automatically happen every week. In the end, you will both benefit from the payment reminder. - More Time for Customers
In our previous blog post discussing the benefits of automated email, we showed the average amount of time saved by using automated email. On some occasions our customers saved as much as 400 hours or more. With that time saved, accounts receivable professionals can focus on talking to customers, creating better relationships and addressing their needs and issues quickly.
When using automated email it truly comes down to what you are now able to do with your time since eliminating manual email creation. In order to collect on your invoices quickly, creating relationships and offering quality customer service will aid in this effort. Spending your extra time improving customer service with automated email is a no-brainer.
