In today’s highly competitive field service business market, is it crucial to work on delivering exceptional customer experience throughout the customer journey. This includes something as trivial and regular as sending an invoice for payment.
If you’re serious about improving customer experience – starting with streamlining your service invoicing process is a great start. Read more on how exactly automating using best invoice management practices positively impacts the customer experience.
Which bad invoicing practices impact customer experience?
Making error-free payment methods available is important to gain customer trust. Any mistake in your online payment gateway or inadequate refund policy will derail your customer experience efforts as follows:
- Delay in sharing invoice: delayed invoices causes issues for customers who are disciplined in their billing cycles and follow fixed dates.
- Lack of transparency: not sharing how the charges are calculated leads to more support calls demanding explanations for the priced services.
- Lack of payment options: especially for cross-border online payments, customers would expect multiple payment options that are less of a hassle for them.
- Disorganized invoicing: if a customer wants to access an invoice sent 6 months ago for tax purposes, they would expect your team to hand over the same on time.
- Poor dispute resolution practices: not responding to dispute emails, stalling invoice support tickets, or lack of dispute resolution measures deeply hurt your brand value and customer experience.
It is possible to avoid the above pitfalls by simply adopting invoicing software.
How invoicing software improves customer experience?
An invoicing software automates the end-to-end invoicing process from capturing data, branding invoice design, and sending invoices to following up for payments. Apart from saving a service business’s time and resources, it has a positive impact on customer experience as follows:
Personalization for every customer
Many invoicing software provides pre-built customizable templates to build your brand on top of it. It can also retrieve customer data from your field service management software or dedicated CRM to personalize the invoice. Adding fields like name, address, contact, or additional notes builds trust in your overall invoicing process.
You can also notify your customer by sending emails and SMS about the pending invoice. It is also possible to send reminders about the upcoming payment without your team’s manual intervention.
Reduction in errors
Sending an invoice with more amount than the actual charges creates a bad impression about your firm’s professionalism. Reduced charges will cause losses for you, and a repeat invoice to cover up the pending amount causes more confusion and work for your customers. With invoicing software, one reduces the possibility of such errors and maintains prompt invoicing practices.
Multiple payment options
Many invoicing software comes with multiple online payment options. This is more important for field service businesses which often are remotely managed. Such services may also require international payment options. Zuper, a field service management software also provides customer financing options. Providing such flexibility increases your ease of doing business.
Access invoice history
Your customer may want a copy of the invoice shared months prior for taxation or other compliance purposes. Else, they might want to review the service history or get clarifications from your team about charges. For this, maintaining invoice history via a dashboard is a quick way for your customers to access the required information. Having an invoice history dashboard also helps with dispute resolution. This also eliminates any support calls for retrieving information.
Can provide customized and standard billing options
Service businesses are prone to provide customization when delivering their work – and making payments is no exception. One may opt for milestone-based payment, or some may opt for payment after completion.
Using invoicing software, it is possible to provide either a standard payment scheme for a quick resolution or prepare custom quotes. If your business deals with large-scale projects, custom pricing might be a requirement – but taking care of such varied schemes is difficult in manual invoicing. Hence, it is better to digitize and ensure seamless payment for your customers.
Improve your customer experience with invoicing software today
An invoicing software makes the life of your customer and your team very easy. It ensures both are in sync when it comes to payments and closing the project.
For a field service management business, one has to think beyond usual invoice management systems. At Zuper, we understand the need to sync data across your contract management, field service operations, and payments for efficient business operations. Book a demo to check out how our invoicing software is able to streamline payments and billing process today.
