About Collections Strategy
Ever since Growfin launched its Collections Strategy, we’ve seen it do a great job in reducing the manual efforts that the collections team goes through. But we went a step further and did a deep dive. Come rain or shine, we wanted no stone unturned when it came to making it more robust to help improve collections efficiency.
So this is what we did. We went back to our customers and performed a detailed problem discovery that brought into light a new set of pain points. We sat down and started working backward from the customer inputs and that’s when the Collections Strategy V2 took shape.
The Collections Strategy V2 gives you the best of both worlds through smarter collection strategies by enabling you to customize collection rules but with more granular control—from a customer level to an invoice level.
Our collections strategy was based on one basic yet effective thought—not all customers pay the same way so why should your collections process be? So our primary goal was to ensure that you can collect better with customized strategies.
Stop sending yet another dunning email that your customers turn a deaf ear to. But there was still some room to make it more viable. Enter V2.
I am here today to spill the beans on what makes our Collections Strategy V2 intelligent!
What is debt collection and why is it important to implement it?
In B2B, there's always a fair amount of chance that customers don't pay on time. It is important to remember that a transaction stays incomplete until the cash from the customers for a credit sale is realized in the bank. Debt collection is necessary for businesses to ensure the money owed by customers to the company is paid on time or at the earliest from the due date. A stable debt collection strategy streamlines the way you collect. It also ensures customer satisfaction throughout the process.
Highlights of Collections Strategy V2
- Invoice segments
- Pause and resume at an invoice level on PTPs and disputes
- Contextual internal escalations
- Recurring follow-up actions
- Invoice-level control of strategy
Let’s dive a little deeper to understand how each of these features helps in better collections.
1. Invoice segments
We have seen different customers needing different strategies but within an account, different invoices might need different collection follow up tracks. Based on payment terms, collection statuses, and other parameters, invoices might be followed up differently. For this reason, the strategy consumes all your invoice-level custom fields to help you create different invoice segments. So when you set up your collection follow ups, you have the power to map invoice segments that you created to each step in your collection strategy. Change the segments on the go, by viewing all your invoice segments consolidated in one place.
2. Pause/Resume follow ups based on collection activities
What makes Growfin an intelligent collections tool is the built-in capability to understand your actions on an invoice, pick up the context, and deliver the right emails to the right account. Adding to that intelligence, you can now pause emails on receiving a response and resume based on the actions you set like marking an invoice as a PTP or adding a dispute that was raised by the customer.
It just doesn't stop there. If the payment from a customer has slipped and the invoice remains open beyond the expected date, you can also set a rule to resume it after a payment slip. This applies to dispute resolution as well.
3. Handle escalations better, with ‘escalations’ as a dedicated action
Escalation handling just became a lot easier with this update. You will no longer have to go back to your notes and action items to see how many invoices over a certain age have to be internally escalated to sales or customer success teams. Automatically assign internal escalations with this feature to flag such invoices.
4. Follow up with customers until they pay
The previous version of the collections strategy allows you to follow up on all invoices at once till a certain invoice age. To up your game, the new version will allow you to follow up with your customers until they have paid. This is for customer segments that require continuous email reminders until payment is received. The recurring follow up feature allows you to create an infinite number of follow ups until the payment is completed. You can configure this for multiple invoices so that the last email follow-up action is repeated at the frequency you specify.
5. Execute follow up emails based on invoice segments
Pick only those invoices that you want to pause or resume under a strategy instead of performing a common action to all customers included in the strategy. This invoice-level control lets you select invoices in bulk across various strategies giving you better access to perform personalized actions.
Also, you might want to pause an invoice for many reasons. The new version of Growfin’s Collections Strategy has filters in the Invoices page that helps you identify which invoices are paused and which ones are in active follow up. You will also be able to pause or resume invoices in bulk from the invoices list page.
That’s not all, we’ve got some more! But we’re reserving it for our one-on-one personalized walkthrough. Curious to explore more of the Collections Strategy V2? Book a call with us today!
