Enhancing Customer Experience through e-Invoicing

As the average adult spends more time in front of a screen, each day, than they spend asleep*, we are becoming connoisseurs of the digital experience.  This immersion in technology, at an individual level, leads to the expectation that we can access services readily online, across a growing variety of devices.

There cannot be a single business that has not felt the need to adapt to meet this change in customer behavior.  Indeed, many businesses have seized this opportunity to develop a competitive advantage, through better access to their services online.

It is no longer an advantage to simply offer services online, rather how these services are offered online is the focus.  From this need, the discipline of user experience (known as UX) has grown to support businesses as they test and refine customer experiences online.

Through careful manipulation of customer experience, or Customer Experience Management (CEM), businesses can reduce churn (retain customers), improve sales conversion rates and drive new business through the creation of brand advocates.

Exactly how a business optimizes UX depends on how their brand answers customers’ needs.  In many cases, particularly for services, user experiences should be intuitive and fast.  Consider how likely you are to proceed with an online purchase if a web page takes more than 3 seconds to load these days, this wasn’t the case 5 years ago, and in 5 years’ time it’s likely that we will be even less patient online.

As customers become less patient, there is a growing demand for tools and interfaces enabling direct and easy access to services, on their terms, when they want.  This expectation crosses over into business-to-business relationships, calling for individual empowerment and unfettered access to content and services.

E-invoicing and customer experience management

One of the most frequent touchpoints between suppliers and buyers is the invoice.  Ensuring that invoices are accurate and easy to read, as well as easily accessible is an important step towards optimizing customer experience.  Electronic invoicing (or e-invoicing) can make this quickly become reality, through optimized document layouts, and more accurate invoice content.

Beyond the layout of invoices, e-invoicing offers many benefits for the customer experience.  Not least of which is the ability to deliver invoices electronically, in a variety of formats to suit the recipients.  Moreover, electronic delivery is most effectively achieved by delivering a link to an online e-invoice, stored in a secure portal.  The use of a portal improves security and can provide beneficial extra services to customers – such as the ability to download and print invoices, search their invoicing history and even pay invoices online swiftly.

Improving customer experience and saving support costs

One metric to judge the value of this enhanced customer experience, seen through e-invoicing, is the reduction in calls to the support desk.  This reduction is achieved by empowering customers to answer their most common needs themselves.  These can include:

• • Updating contact details
  • Updating payment details
  • Requesting a copy of current or historic invoices
  • Paying due invoices

A case study of Netsend’s e-invoicing solution for Neopost presents a real-life example of how well this can work.

Customers don’t want to wait in a queue for support staff to assist them, so the delivery of an e-invoicing solution that enables them to answer their most common needs goes a long way to improving customer service and therefore customer experience.  Support teams can then, more quickly, answer support requests that actually need individual assistance.

Good customer experience goes beyond expectations

Customers don’t just expect services to be available online now, they expect them to be ergonomically optimized for access over mobile phones and tablets (which constitute 56% of device screen time**).

As a leading provider of electronic invoicing solutions, the Corcentric platform has been rebuilt from the ground up to optimize user experience across mobile phones, tablets and computer screens of all possible sizes.  Our long history of working closely with clients to deliver tailored experiences has positioned us well to analyze, and design for, users’ needs across every aspect of the Corcentric platform.

Corcentric goes further than other solutions, offering an e-invoicing (and document distribution) platform that can be tweaked and branded on top of what is already an industry-leading user experience.  Never has it been so easy to swiftly deploy class-leading e-invoicing for your customers.

Corcentric does this all as an outsourced service, requiring minimal assistance to integrate with accounts receivable systems.  Gone are the days where e-invoicing required a high upfront investment and took months to deploy.  Corcentric enables your business to enhance customer experience, through e-invoicing, quickly and cost-efficiently.  Get in touch and find out more about our new platform today.

You can also find more information about how e-invoicing is enhancing customer experience in our white paper on Improving Cash Flow and Service through e-billing and e-invoicing.

*CNN analysis of Nielsen Report on screen time
**The State of Mobile Web in the US in 2015