It’s no secret that lack of business process automation hurts the bottom line for many companies.
In fact, it has been found that businesses can save up to 70% of costs with automation. Moreover, through choosing the right billing software to automate your invoicing cycle, businesses can save up to $10 per invoice.
However, choosing the right billing software with advanced automation doesn’t just bring cost benefits to your billing function in isolation, it has wider business process benefits.
Here’s why billing software is a great choice for your business automation
1. Automating The End-To-End Customer Journey
Let’s face it, from the point that a customer first engages with a business’ product, to the point that they become a loyalist, there can be multiple systems in the background, plus disparate functional teams that are docking into each part of their product experience journey. From Marketing, Sales, Operations, to Finance, it is not uncommon that each department is using their own preferred systems and processes to ensure they are delivering a seamless experience for the end customer. However, lack of automation between the systems that each function is leveraging can cost businesses valuable resource time due to manual swivel chair processes, inaccuracies in the sharing of information, having to rectify data duplication, and over-reporting from lack of end-to-end data visibility.
This is where an advanced billing solution can connect the dots. It can automate the entire process from the point that the customer checks out their cart, reviews a quote, signs a contract, receives their order, pays for their invoice, to coming back for a repeat purchase. Furthermore, through intelligent reporting tools, all functions across the business can have visibility of this end-to-end customer journey and the resulting revenue performance.
2. Accurate Sharing of Data Across Systems
The dependence on several disconnected systems to carry out day-to-day operations means organizations can end up spending more time on mundane, error-prone tasks such as fixing data discrepancies, and less on empowering customers or improving their subscription experience. In fact, it has been estimated that poor data and inaccurate information sharing is costing US businesses $3 trillion per year.
That’s where the benefit of an advanced billing platform comes into play. With an open API platform, the billing engine can integrate with other enterprise-wide systems across ERP, CRM, Accounting, Payment Gateways, Taxation, Provisioning and Activation systems. This way, data can be seamlessly shared across systems, ensuring the utmost accuracy.
3. Ensuring Seamless Workflows
Let’s be real, manual order fulfillment processes are not only time-consuming but also error-prone. Consequently, it results in customers being dissatisfied with their service delivery and can lead to lost retention and sales. Given the number of variables, the high level of personalization, and customization involved, instant activation becomes a gargantuan task in the absence of automated order fulfillment workflows.
Therefore, it is imperative that organizations are empowered with the capability to define workflows without any manual intervention and call on any upstream, midstream or downstream systems to ensure all operational processes have been completed. With a modern billing solution, this is made possible, as it will facilitate orders to channel through different workflow stages automatically to provision and activate the service faster and with high business accuracy.
Convinced by the power of billing systems to drive automation? Explore how your business can minimize unnecessary spend on manual, error-prone processes by taking a tour of a solution like OneBill.
