Digitalized invoicing – the path to better customer service and higher efficiency

It goes without saying that inefficient billing processes waste a company’s time and resources. But, deriving the full benefits from a digital billing solution is a relatively simple way of streamlining those processes and improving the customer experience at the same time.

If you still think this is only about replacing paper invoices with PDFs, it’s time take another look! By getting all the advantages out of advancements in digital technology, your company will be able to make many of its internal processes more efficient. Today’s smart solutions for invoicing and payments generate a variety of ripple effects. Besides saving a lot of processing time, it also reduces the pressure on your customer service function so they you can focus those efforts on creating a better overall experience for your customers instead.

But which digital solutions yield the best results? Here are three smart features that will help streamline your internal processes and make customers happier as part of the bargain!

1. Automated matching of customer and invoice

Many companies make the mistake of only digitalizing the invoicing process. It means that they forfeit the savings that can be derived from doing the same with the payment process. Even is a customer receives a digital invoice, it still requires a lot of manual processing, especially when it comes to correcting small errors with the payment, such as when the customer has accidently omitted one of the digits in the payment reference number. But with a modern payment system, the entire process is digitized, which means that payments can be automatically matched to the right customer, even when there are some small errors in the details. It does away with a huge amount of manual processing, which means significant time savings internally. For customers, they avoid getting a payment reminder on invoices that they believe they have already paid.

2. Dynamic Distribution

Dynamic distribution is a relatively new feature that is expected to make a big impact over the coming years. With dynamic distribution, new attempts are automatically made to send the invoice via a different avenue when the first attempt has failed. For example, of you send the invoice by email and the system notices that it still hasn’t been opened and read after several days, it can automatically be sent in a text message instead. Similarly, a new attempt to execute the payment can occur automatically after a few days if a direct debit payment was not successful on the first attempt. If the second attempt also fails, the customer will automatically be sent a text message or email to encourage them to make the payment a different way. How those mailings are handled is determined ahead of time and it can be optimized based on customers’ actual behavior. Dynamic distribution reduces the risk of missed payments, which, ordinarily, would have meant a lot more manual processing for your customer service function and your customers winding up with irritating late fees.

3. Interactive Invoice

Although it’s a step in the right direction for many companies to transition from paper invoices sent by regular mail to PDFs that are sent via email, they are still not deriving the full benefits of digitalization. Interactive invoices are a much more effective way of maximizing the cost and resource savings.

Modern, interactive invoices are updated in real time, such as when the customer makes a partial payment or a customer service representative changes the due date. The customer can also communicate directly with your customer service function on the invoice and each party will be looking at the same view, which makes it much easier to process customer service tickets.

Last but not least, interactive invoices offer companies an entirely new communication channel for relaying valuable information to customers, which they can act on directly simply by clicking on it in the invoice. For example, the adaptable communication module can be used to send tailored offers, important information about changes in agreements, or links to “My Account”.

Here, you can read more about how to use Billogram’s digital payment solution to digitalize your invoicing administration.