Why You Shouldn’t Use Your Billing System for Collections

If you’re looking for ways to improve your accounts receivable productivity, one of the first places to look is at your accounts receivables automation processes. Many companies continue to use their ERP or accounting systems for accounts receivables management, even though it requires significant time and labor investments.

If you’re still using your ERP or accounting system for collections, your agents are likely spending large chunks of their time chasing down customer information in disparate systems and updating documents that live all over your intranet. What they’re not doing, however, is even more pertinent. When all that time is wasted searching for information, your agents are blocked from doing the single most powerful thing they can do to improve your accounts receivables management: communicating with your customers.

Using your billing system for collections can be detrimental to your business. Here’s how leading companies do it instead.

It’s Time to Fire Your Billing System

As an agent attempting to collect a debt, it’s hard enough to get a customer on the phone. Once you do, you often have a short time to establish trust and launch into your ask. How you use that time matters — don’t spend it frantically looking from screen to screen to get a comprehensive view of the debt you’re trying to collect. Instead, use that time to connect with your customer and implement conversational best practices that let you to accomplish your goals.

Because billing software isn’t designed for collections, it gets in the way of your agents’ ability to do their jobs well. When agents are forced to use one program to search for customer contact information, another to see historical information about previous conversations and yet another to get an understanding of the status of the debt they’re trying to collect, it significantly impairs their ability to be present and focus on connecting with the customer.

Instead, agents need a single, 360-degree view in a single window that exposes your entire business relationship with the customer. With that powerful viewpoint, agents can quickly digest the most important details about their customers — without switching from window to window or screen to screen. And that level of information availability frees up agents to determine how they can best help their customers resolve the debts at hand.

When you consolidate all debt- and customer-related information onto a single screen, you enable agents to decrease their wrap times and increase the volume of their collections. And that leads to more successful outcomes in shorter periods of time and an improved all-around customer experience.

Latitude by Genesys is a standalone platform that currently integrates with the Genesys^® PureConnect^TM product and makes all necessary information — current and historic — available to agents in a single desktop on a single platform. This lets you fully understand the state of your inventory as accounts move through the collection-and-recovery process.

To learn more about Latitude by Genesys, schedule a call with a collections software expert today.