It’s amazing how many service organizations still fight the benefits of automating their business to improve their cash situations and reduce headaches. One study conducted in 2014 by PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) reveals some interesting statistics:
Operating efficiency— more sophisticated systems can reduce total cost of ownership of the technology while increasing quality. They also can accelerate speed-to-market with product and service innovations. Specific benefits that can be achieved:
- 3%-5% increase in speed-to-market for new products and service offerings.
- Up to 40% decrease in cash processing costs.
- 5%-20% decrease in billing-related IT costs.
- Improved internal workflow, streamlining issues resolution, and reducing the time spent by customer service in the cash application and account current resolution processes.
- Reduced bill error rate.
- Improved compliance and ability to audit and report.
Financial performance— Better billing technology can boost financial performance in several ways. Results that were observed:
- 5% reduction in bad debt.
- 20%-25% improvement in days payment was outstanding, resulting in faster use of funds due to:Faster resolution of issues.
- Faster receipt of cash and apply cash.
Customer satisfaction and retention— Enhanced billing capabilities can increase satisfaction and retention by:
- Improving the ability to resolve issues.
- Making it easier overall to do business with the company.
Other results observed include:
- 2%-3% increase in cross-selling.
- 2%-5% increase in retention.
- 3%-5% decrease in service call time.
- Strengthened brand recognition.
Here are just 2 simple tips to consider that can help:
- If you have field personnel and consultants that are dragging their heels getting time and expenses in on time as well as project status. Why not make it easy for them buy adding a mobile app for the field that can capture time and expenses, photograph receipts and track project deliverables?
- Connect those disconnected systems, reduce duplicate data entry as well as manual intervention by accounting and administrative personnel. Why not use an integrated professional services automation (PSA) solution that was designed to reduce duplication, streamline processing and connects to your existing systems?
You will find many ways to address these two issues but you would be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t check-out PSA by Upland. With decades of experience delivering software solutions for service organizations, we literally wrote the book on this market “Professional Services Automation: Optimizing Project & Service Oriented Organizations”.
About the Author: Blake Bisson has decades of experience as a senior executive in start-up and large publicly traded companies in product management, product marketing, marketing and sales. At Upland Software he has run product marketing for both PowerSteering and most recently PSA.