• The Challenge

    As a national business turning over a healthy $80m annually, our client was in need of an improved system to deal with a mountain of bad debts that were being accumulated every year. Legacy software systems were greatly limiting their oversight and management of customer account issues, making it extremely difficult to take necessary action and solve problems before they reached the stage of collections and default. When a customer account is overdue and at risk, it is not efficient to send escalation emails to a preoccupied, time-poor manager. With no visibility to track outgoing communication or accountability, something needed to be done.

  • The Solution

    We devised a system that enables managers from multiple departments to view and act on debtor data early. So how does that work? All overdue accounts and their histories, are assigned to the customer account line and the right person. This allows everyone from the team to view and action the necessary next steps for swift escalation. Put simply, if the list is blank, you’ve done everything that you need to do; if the list has an item, then it’s actionable. Due to the flexible nature of our solution’s technology, we were able to develop and make improvements as we went along and as our client’s processes evolved.

  • The Results

    Our solution significantly improved the internal collaboration of the business, promoting a systemised and strategic approach to collections and communications with customers. This in turn has helped prevent further customer credit problems. With real-time data updating in our Smartsheet solution, the internal team can now better respond to customers quickly while also gaining full visibility of how collections are progressing. Beyond improved efficiency, this debtor management solution has significantly motivated the collection team and transformed the customer’s collection results. Today, only a small percentage of debts are rolling over from month to month, with bad debts reduced by over 80% in comparison to previous years.

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decrease in bad debt

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increase in revenue

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decrease of bad debt
as % of revenue