Intercom is a software company that was founded in 2011. Starting as an app that helped businesses manage and track their communication with website visitors, Intercom’s product quickly scaled to cater to larger companies and enterprises. Today, the company builds communications software that unifies every aspect of the customer journey, from conversion to engagement to support.
Intercom has its headquarters in San Francisco with offices in Chicago, Dublin, Sydney and London. More than 25,000 organizations use Intercom. As a self-serve SaaS product, this /number includes a good number of SMBs along with large enterprises.
Receivables came under the spotlight for Intercom when the comparatively smaller volume of enterprises in their customer base became a large source of revenues for the company. For customers on contract, collecting money was becoming a challenge due to the fact that the bulk of their revenues, which was stuck in receivables, was managed using manual work.
The best place to start to paint a picture of Intercom’s original efforts is their tech stack. The team was using Stripe to process and support self-serve customer payments. Zuora was being used for managing subscriptions and invoices, a manual spreadsheet to manage collections, and all of their reporting was being built in Tableau. Having to manage and build out all of these different tools and different places to manually update was making a lot of work for the team. They were seeing bandwidth issues particularly coming from collections and reporting.
Intercom’s AR Process Before Growfin (and how we solved it)
Receivables were an issue for Intercom when the smaller volume of enterprises in their customer base became a large revenue source for the company.
Collecting money was becoming a challenge because the bulk of their revenues, which was stuck in receivables, was done using manual work.
With the volume, the biggest challenge for the team was being unable to predict collections and forecasts, because of the dynamic nature of their business.
Despite adding more people to the invoice-to-cash process, the AR team felt choked with the scale and they were also not able to prioritize their work properly.
Here’s what their collections process looked like before automation:
- They were using Stripe to process and support self-serve customer payments
- Zuora was being used for subscriptions management and invoices
- A spreadsheet to manage collections
- And Tableau for their reporting needs
Managing different tools and different places, along with manual updating processes meant lots of work.
They built a proper collections process in early 2020.
The manual AR process was a series of very impersonal dunning messages sent through Zuora.
- The team manually pulls a list from ERP of all invoices that were more than 45 days overdue.
- It took them several hours to review the list.
- Following that, they would manually send a final warning message through the ERP system
- The list of customers to whom the message was sent was tracked in Google sheet. However, they couldn’t track whether the customer viewed or received the message.
- The team used a color coding system to indicate customers who had paid, not paid, responded, etc.
- They also manually had a notes section of the sheet to indicate any exceptions or to provide context on payment status.
- Finally the team sends messages in Gmail and Slack to get everyone on the same page.
Let’s take a look at their challenges and how Growfin helped solve them in detail:
Tracking and Real-Time Visibility
- The biggest challenge at Intercom was the lack of real-time visibility for the leadership, managers, and the collections team in accounts status.
- This slowed tracking and execution, eventually impacting collections.
- Spreadsheet notes were used to identify whom to track.
- Often recorded in the same cell and there was no easy way to track the payment and communication history.
- In the end, there was no predictability to understand their customer’s payment behavior.
This got worse with increased volumes.
Dispute Handling
- There were two parts to this: recording disputes and tracking them.
- Both had to be done keeping all the stakeholders on the same page.
- Their dispute handling did not provide the shared content and this made it hard to close disputes faster, leading to a bad customer experience.
- They used ERP for AR data since this is where customer information and billing details were stored.
- Whenever billing, customer success, or sales had to get involved, they lacked context.
- Any emails that went out from ERP with the finance/operations team cc’d often ended up in spam.
Growfin Solution
Growfin helped create a dispute workflow for Intercom.
With its help, the Intercom team was able to create disputes from Growfin and assign them to whoever they wanted internally, with the entire history of the particular invoice & customers.
These disputes were also tracked in real-time inside Growfin at a dispute level, which helped the executive team have a better understanding of the system.
Additionally, with the help of past dispute closure times, the Growfin AI engine was able to predict the time to close the dispute giving them greater predictability.
Personalization
- The team used plain email reminders automation of the ERP system, leading to emails landing getting flagged as spam.
- The team was using ERP’s Dunning module, so emails were not personalized.
- Emails went out from a generic ID (notifications@intercom.com) instead of a custom one
- Open and click rates were low, and they were not able to cc anybody.
- A trail of conversations could not be maintained because the email ID was “do-not-reply.”
Growfin Solution
The Growfin AI bot was trained to automatically send reminder emails to customers, based on the responses and the invoice due date.
These emails were sent from a custom ID (at a collector level/manager level) based on the email. The Intercom team was also able to track whether the emails were opened or not, helping them have a better view of the follow-ups.
Assignments and Follow-Ups
- The accounts assignment process was manual.
- At the start of the month, the AR team pulls out overdue invoices from the master sheet, which was split across collectors.
- The same accounts got assigned to different collectors at different times.
- Every 30 days, a generic workflow automation sequence in Zuora sent follow-ups based on “if-else” rules. However, the actual vetting process was manual.
- This hindered boosting customer experiences since having a dedicated collector helps with more context.
Growfin Solution
Growfin’s AI assigned accounts to collectors based on geographies, regions, business units, payment patterns, and collection risk based on customers’ past behavior. Their AI engine also predicted monthly collections based on current value.
Reporting
- AR collections reporting did not happen in real-time.
- Managers needed visibility on disputes and the accounts that were stuck.
- When the CFO needed a cash flow level report or a dashboard, the team used Tableau, which took data from tickets, Zuora, Netsuite, and spreadsheets.
- Data was dispersed across multiple systems, and lots of spreadsheets were used by different stakeholders.
- It took time to reconcile data for a high-level view of the AR process.
- Quick decision-making on critical accounts was out of the question.
Growfin Solution
Growfin’s Dashboard and Analytics model helped Intercom get automatically generated reports.
These reports were also automatically scheduled to the respective stakeholders based on their requirements.
Some sample reports were cash forecasts, collection risks, customer payment behavior, and credit risk.
These reports could also be sliced and diced based on entity, geography, and business unit.
Business Impact with Growfin
- We reduced their time to collect by 37%
- We reduced manual effort and improved efficiency by 68%
- Their DSO reduced by 30%
Summarizing Intercom’s Transformation with Growfin
Intercom experienced process improvements upon working closely with Growfin.
- Their AR process became more streamlined and predictable
- They were able to manage customer communications and work well with their internal stakeholders and track them inside a single system
- The data flowed seamlessly from their ERP to Growfin, which further integrates with Intercom to enable dispute management
- Growfin became the single source of truth to manage AR
Growfin helped them achieve this by setting up:
- Customer segments
- Collection strategies
- Prioritized worklists for teams
- Automated email reminder sequences
- Rules for collaborations
- Tracking payments
- Promise-to-pays
- Escalations and disputes &
- Getting visibility into cash flow
Growfin has completely automated the invoice-to-cash process for Intercom.
About Growfin
Growfin is the world’s first Finance CRM, aiming to make a difference in the way teams manage their AR processes.
Growfin helps:
- Reduce your DSO by 33%, so you can collect cash faster from your customers.
- Collect cash faster by 27%.
- Get real-time visibility on all your customers.
- Improve productivity by 30-50% since Growfin automates routine tasks that you do.
- Automate cash application by 80%, with AI capabilities.
- Achieve over 80% touch-less cash posting.
- Work collaboratively with your sales and customer success teams.
- Provide round-the-clock support and a dedicated Customer Success Manager.
- Support multiple languages and multiple currencies
Growfin is GDPR and SOC2 compliant, and trusted by leading brands across the globe, like Greenhouse, Postman, and Outcomes.
