You always need to prioritise maintaining customer-friendly contacts throughout your entire organisation. Your aftersales service, for example, knows that it has to remain patient and kind at all times – even with annoying customers who never stop complaining.
And when a customer has not paid in full or is too late in settling their invoice, it’s important to adopt a sympathetic process for sending reminders. Our software makes it much easier to be really strict with your reminders while at the same time taking into account any exceptions or special arrangements and agreements. It also helps you ensure you contact the right people and consider previous customer loyalty.
Context-dependent reminders
There are various scenarios in which you might want to send different customers different reminders. Depending on the context, you can decide to start by sending a friendly email, or even not send any reminders at all under a certain amount or percentage.
Suppose you have a loyal customer who always pays their invoices on time, but they accidentally forgot and skipped one before then making a subsequent payment. In this case, it would be better not to send them an impersonal reminder incurring additional costs. On the contrary, they deserve a friendly reminder email to simply inform them about their oversight.
But sending these reminders automatically can be more complicated than people might expect, and things can go wrong if you don’t always put the customer first. Another example: a customer might not have paid an invoice in full by mistake, resulting in a small balance still to settle. Your automatic reminder settings are configured to not send anything for under 25 euros, but extra background charges now take the expected payment up above this threshold. You might then have to deal with an angry customer on the phone if they receive an impersonal reminder.
Flexible automation
There are lots of aspects to take into account if you want to send customer-friendly reminders. Do you want to not include amounts or percentages under a certain threshold, for example? Or offer the possibility of a payment plan? Are there any scenarios in which it’s better to send separate reminders to individual departments? Will credit notes be valid straight away? Do you check your latest bank statements just before sending your reminders out? Do you need to consider different departments and projects for the same customer? Have any special payment arrangements been made for a particular customer?
Built on NetSuite Dunning
We’ve come up with a solution for an automated reminder process that works on the existing NetSuite Dunning module. Depending on your situation and wishes, we can customise modifications to this module to perfectly suit your company.
This solution makes it possible to send reminders at three different levels, from a gentle first reminder email to a much more strongly worded reminder. You can also use the software to follow up whether you need to take further steps and send out default notices.
If desired, we can also add in an extra stage to send a so-called gentle reminder of the payment due date – e.g. three days in advance – either to all customers or just a particular selection.
We can send reminders to different contact persons for different departments within the same company, too. Or you might have a customer asking for all their invoices to be sent to the group, even though you’re actually in touch with a number of their subsidiary companies. You can even add extra contacts in these reminders.
And we’ve got rid of a few default settings that sometimes created difficult situations. Suppose a customer had an outstanding invoice for 10 euros that was 90 days past its due date, for example, and another outstanding invoice for 5000 euros just 30 days past its due date. The software’s default settings meant the customer would receive a strongly worded reminder for 5010 euros straight away because it worked on the basis of the oldest due date.
Benefits of the Dynappco solution for NetSuite Dunning
- Exact amount owed taking all factors into account
- Exact number of days overdue, again taking all factors into account
- Does not invoice below certain amounts/percentages
- Credit notes incorporated in invoices
- Separate reminders for individual companies within the same group
- Proposed payment plan for customer
- Three levels of reminders
- And more
Want to find out more?
Your organisation is sure to have some customers who pay their invoices too late. So make sure your reminders are flexible and customer-friendly. Contact us now and we’ll happily explain how to implement our solution in your organisation.