Driving Customer Success in Order-to-Cash: 6 Steps to Increase Time to Value

Establishing a customer success team starts with hiring the right people. Do they have the technical background you are looking for? Do they have the right skills to understand business problems and work with your customers? Do they have experience in financial digital transformation projects?

These form the critical foundations to building a successful customer success team. Organizations that restructure their customer-facing teams into a single customer success department led by a VP that reports to the CEO is one way of ensuring the customer is at the forefront of every business decision.

Once the team has been established, a mission should be defined early on, ensuring everyone in the team and across the organization buy into the same mantra.

Customer success metrics are used to determine what kind of customer experience you are delivering. You can view yourself as a customer-centric business, but you still need to understand if your product or service is having a positive impact on a customer’s daily operations.

Operational day-to-day metrics such as frequency of users logging in and transaction volumes can easily be monitored regularly with checkpoints in place to ensure the product or service is meeting KPIs. However, as inputs and custome behavior changes, organizations need to ensure checks are in place to quickly respond if any red flags are raised.

Other important key metrics include:

• Productivity levels – the goal here is not to monitor your employees, it is to evaluate inefficient processes and use this information to repurpose FTEs for higher value activity such as optimizing key customer accounts.
• Automation levels – regular reviews to ensure error rates have improved, invoicing is more efficient, and payments are made on time.
• Predicting late payments and disputes – understanding how many payments are likely to come in late or will be disputed are key to optimizing cash flow and making more informed decisions.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – presents customers with a simple survey, then feeds their answers into a formula to produce a single figure for benchmarking. Analyzing this as a key metric allows organizations to channel their customer success efforts to grow revenues and increase up-sell opportunities.
• Net Retention Rates – calculates the health of a SaaS organization based on the existing customer retention rate. Not only does this measure how successful a company is at renewing or sustaining customer contracts, but also how well it is doing at generating additional revenue from its existing customer base. This is invaluable when gauging how long customers use the solution, how and when they upgrade and how often they unsubscribe. Having this information helps provide direction on how to increase the value of your business in the future.

The benefit of a SaaS solution versus on-premise is the ability to access a huge array of data that feeds into the customer success model. On-premise solutions can guide decisions but this is by no means productive versus the depth of data available from a Cloud solution. Data that tracks patterns and trends across different customer types can provide predictions much faster than any human can.

This data becomes particularly important during times of crisis when sudden changes in customer behavior take place. How can you predict if your customers will pay on time or whether disputes are likely to occur? Organizations can leverage artificial intelligence to predict late payment dates and disputes so finance teams can manage cash flow more effectively and provide better forecasting to stakeholders.

This is where the true value of AI lies. Organizations should ask themselves if they are fully interpreting data across the entire finance process or just part of it? Do these findings then translate intomeaningful insights and better decision-making to impact the customer experience?

Freeda is an Artificial Intelligence-enabled Digital Assistant for Order to Cash and Treasury teams. It is capable of answering questions and helping with work just like a knowledgeable colleague, or reliable resource.

Natural Language Processing

Freeda speaks your language. Just like a real person. Ask a question in the chat-box and Freeda will get back with an answer. Freeda leverages natural language processing algorithms to understand language. The algorithms enable Freeda to realize the ‘intent’ behind virtually hundreds of thousands of user questions and provide appropriate response and information.

Integrated across finance operations

Freeda speaks your language. Just like a real person. Ask a question in the chat-boxand Freeda will get back with an answer. Freeda leverages natural language processing algorithms to understand language. The algorithms enable Freeda to realize the ‘intent’ behind virtually hundreds of thousands of user questions and provide appropriate response and information.

The more customers engage with you and other users, the more likely they are to self-serve and be successful. Customers who know how to use your product or service and enjoy it will continue using it. If their experience is extraordinary, they are likely to recommend your product and the benefits they have achieved to others.

Engagement is not simply about making sure customers get answers to their questions, it’s also about providing a personal touch to your product or service that builds trust and keeps users coming back for more. Regular user groups, conferences, and opportunities for customers to interact are vital for customers to drive success.

Customer-centricity isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a necessity that is core to the business and valued by every function. It starts with the very first interaction and continues seamlessly throughout the customer lifecycle.

This approach can play an instrumental part in keeping ahead of the competition when ongoing regulatory pressures, cost reduction priorities and rapidly shifting market trends and customer needs are at play. Customer centricity can help you grow revenues, improve efficiency, and drive sustainable profit.

Organizations should consider executing a continuous improvement strategy that ensures the implementation remains in line with business goals and delivers with changing business needs.

Organizations that are truly focused on building their business around their customers are empowering top executives to own the customer journey, from initial contact through to final resolution. This tactic enables individuals to be accountable for customer experience at key touchpoints within the customer lifecycle.

Mastering customer success undoubtedly results in positive outcomes such as lower churn, improved customer retention, and better cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Driving this customer success model across the organization will dramatically accelerate time to value and create customers who evangelize about their achievements.