Introducing Tesorio AR Essentials: Stop Dunning, Collect Better, Delight Customers
There’s a glaring hole in virtually every company’s customer experience strategy that nobody seems to be thinking about - how we collect payment from customers. In fact, the collections process doesn’t even appear on most customer experience plans, and that’s a problem for both customer experience and collections effectiveness.
This is why today we are announcing the launch of Tesorio AR Essentials to provide an affordable and easy-to-use way for all companies to access the Tesorio platform which is already a leader in the space.
Our mission with this product is to help every company, regardless of size, to do two critically important things:
- Collect payment from customers more effectively and efficiently
- Delight customers while collecting payment from them
First and foremost, Tesorio AR Essentials provides the turnkey tools our customers already love to instantly create and run best-in-class collections workflows. By quickly and easily setting up automated and highly customizable campaigns collections teams, regardless of size, will be free to focus time and effort on more strategic, and human-to-human activity.
Collections is part of customer experience
It’s not news that business leaders are obsessed with customer experience. Creating great experiences throughout the customer lifecycle is driven by consumer expectations, and is one of the only ways to differentiate from competitors in a tangible and defensible way. So, we map out every interaction from the first marketing touch through onboarding and challenge ourselves to constantly improve.
I think the collections process is overlooked because most companies don’t view finance as a function that is customer-facing. Yet, the fact is that people in finance are communicating with customers on a daily basis. Not only that but these finance-led customer interactions are oriented around a point of huge potential friction and general awkwardness - getting paid. Most of us don’t even like asking our friends for money they owe us, yet we don’t think about how we’re asking our customers to pay us.
The bad news is that the approach is typically a blunt force, impersonal, and often aggressive process called dunning.
The good news is that the vast majority of companies have a defined and well-established approach for collecting from customers. The bad news is that the approach is typically a blunt force, impersonal, and often aggressive process called dunning. For those who don’t know, dunning is a 17th-century term for forcibly extracting payment from customers. Yes, believe it or not, the term and overall approach is still used in most companies today.
Dunning and the tools that enable it need to go
It’s almost comical that in this modern age of customer experience-obsessed business most businesses employ a 17th-century approach to getting paid.
At the heart of the problem is the simple fact that finance lacks the tools to do better. Yes, there are “dunning tools” out there, but they are the equivalent of old-school batch-and-blast email marketing tools and they only accelerate bad behavior.
The result is bad customer experiences and inefficient and ineffective collections.
While marketing and sales have incredible tech stacks that enable exactly the right messages to be sent to exactly the right contacts at exactly the right time, finance has a standard set of phone scripts and collection email templates that are used in bulk with no segmentation, personalization, or consideration for timing — except that when a customer is past-due on a payment the more aggressive and often threatening script and template are used. The result is bad customer experiences and inefficient and ineffective collections.
Clearly, traditional collections and the tools that enable it need to truly and finally become a thing of the past.
With Tesorio AR Essentials, our customers have a platform that provides the information, insights, and intuitive tools needed to communicate with customers about payment like never before. They can build targeted, customized, and trigger-based campaigns, know where and when to focus attention, understand when a more personal touch is needed, perfectly blend automated interactions with a human-to-human touchpoint to drive better outcomes and experiences. After only a couple of months using Tesorio our customers report:
- Improved customer experiences and relationships
- 2X increase in collections efficiency
- 13 day decrease in days sales outstanding
Finally, I have to add that we at Tesorio take our own customers’ experience very seriously. This is why we are ranked Easiest to Use, Easiest to Set Up, Easiest to Do Business With, Best Support, and Users Most Likely to Recommend in the Accounts Receivable Automation category on G2. And the results our customers are driving are why we are also ranked as the Leader in the category.