Transparency in Billing, for You and Your Customers

How often does your finance team — or worse, a customer — discover a billing error within the organization? If your answer is “more often than I’d like to admit,” you’re not alone. MGI reports that 59 percent of businesses experience significant customer friction due to billing disputes and that 42 percent of companies experience some kind of revenue leakage.

So what’s causing these complications? In most cases, the culprit is a lack of transparency in the billing process, either internal, customer-facing, or both. In these cases, outdated or homegrown and cobbled-together billing and reporting systems require so much manual intervention and encompass so many disparate platforms and moving parts that it’s nearly impossible to track what’s happening “under the hood.” This means error-causing deficiencies go unnoticed and unresolved until their ramifications are far-reaching enough to cause real problems for the organization and its customer relationships.

This lack of transparency is especially problematic in the Marketing and Ad Tech industries, where massive volumes of complex transactions, constant market disruption, stiff competition, and sky-high customer expectations converge to make consistent transparency in billing paramount to a company’s success.

That’s why many finance leaders in the Marketing and Ad Tech industries, among others, are turning toward high-powered Intelligent Billing Platforms to centralize and streamline systems, minimizing the risk for errors and making the billing process simple for both the finance team and the customers.

Here are a few ways this transparency keeps things running smoothly in both the front and back offices.

Transparency in Billing Is the Key to a Well-Oiled Back Office

While legacy billing systems and DIY platforms may have been perfectly functional in a company’s early years, as the business scales, these patchwork systems can no longer keep up with the growing volume or complexity of transactions or billing and reporting needs. Often, multiple systems mean data collection and other work is being duplicated as multiple teams take ownership — or overlooked as each assumes the other has it under control.

With systems and teams siloed and unable to see at a glance how processes are moving forward, errors that creep in are likely to go unnoticed until they cause major problems that require significant resources to untangle.

However, with intelligent billing, organizations can eliminate redundancies, automate manual process and, perhaps most importantly, maintain a clear view of every transaction, every report, and every interaction. That way, when a red flag does appear, the bug can be fixed before it turns into an issue.

And to Long-Term Customer Loyalty

If you’ve ever tried to decipher the ins and outs of your city utility bill, you understand how frustrating it is to struggle to understand what you’re being charged for and why. A clear, transparent billing process in which customers know what to expect when they receive their bills — and can quickly interpret and pay them when they arrive — is critical to the health of ongoing relationships.

After all, today’s customers have countless choices for any product or service they’re looking to buy. If they’re not happy with their experience with one company, they’ll move on to another. And the same is true of Marketing and Ad Tech providers. In fact, GMA’s (Global Marketing Alliance) Mobile Transparency Report recently revealed that a lack of transparent practices would prompt just over a fifth of marketers to switch to a rival Ad Tech supplier. Customers need a reason to stay, and the onus is on the service provider to create a consistently stellar experience that will inspire that loyalty.

Billing, the final step of the transaction, is a critical component of that experience. But when billing isn’t transparent — or when lack of transparency in the back office leads to invoicing or collection errors — customers are likely to walk away.

Here again, intelligent billing provides the optimization and transparency customers need to know where they stand at every step of the process, from near-real-time updates to complex usage and rating to simple bill payments.

If transparent billing is critical to a business’ reputation and financial success, why leave it to chance? To learn how intelligent billing can replace your legacy systems, streamline your operations, and enhance your customer experience, take a tour of the Gotransverse platform to check out its capabilities. If you like what you see, schedule your complimentary, personalized demo today.