During the pandemic, we have seen businesses find solutions and create opportunities to keep revenue flowing during the confusion, especially when it comes to payment collection.
We know that nearly 90% of all customers would prefer to interact with a business through text rather than a phone call, so it’s important to make sure your business is offering these services to keep up with demand.
It’s also important to create solutions that will limit the time your employees need to spend on payment collection while still making sure that customers are paying. Here are three steps to ensure your process of payment collection is running smoothly.
Figure Out the Main Issue
First, you need to identify the problem you are having with payment collection. Are your customers just not paying, or are they having a tough time reaching you? Or, is your current system out-of-date?
You need to make sure customers have a way to reach you at any time. If they have a question about a bill, it could take hours or even days playing phone tag, trying to get ahold of a customer to get that person an answer.
If you have a texting system in place, customers can ask a question anytime through the platform, which is attached to your existing business phone line, and get an answer from someone on your team within minutes.
It also allows you to keep a paper trail of transactions. If customers text in, your employees can pull up invoices, show customers what they have paid and when and keep track of invoices for the future.
Set Up Text-to-Pay
Now that you have figured out the problem, it’s time to set up the solution. Text-to-pay is something that may have seemed unlikely even just a few years ago, but in the wake of the pandemic, customers are now expecting businesses to have this product.
By offering text-to-pay, you are going to have an easier time collecting. No more leaving voicemails or waiting by the phone for a call-back. You can send someone a text in seconds, and that person can respond with the payment.
New data our company has collected shows 85% faster payment collection in sales and service with text-to-pay. Why? Because people are familiar with it. Businesses adopted these systems over the pandemic to reduce in-person interaction, and customers like it.
We are also showing that businesses are saving 45 minutes per customer interaction in sales and service by using texting and text-to-pay. With service workers able to send updates to customers in seconds via text and customers filling out their own text-to-pay forms, businesses are saving lots of time.
Take the Burden off Your Employees
By offering text-to-pay, you are taking that burden off employees who are forced to play phone tag to get customers to pay. If customers have to complete transactions themselves, then there is less confusion about where credit card information is coming from and how they will pay.
Another interesting piece of data shows that 91% of customers prefer text-to-pay once they start using it. That means most customers, as soon as they start using text-to-pay, actually like it better than any other form of payment.
Over the past two years, customers have gravitated towards new forms of technology that help make daily life simpler. Text-to-pay is an easy way for you to meet the customer where he or she wants to be and to ensure you can speed up payment collection at your dealership.
Ben Leighton is a Content Marketing Specialist with Kenect. He previously worked in the journalism industry for over a decade, creating multimedia content on various platforms. You can find Ben on Linkedin and Twitter.
Kenect helps businesses connect with their customers. We build simple texting tools that are elegant and easy-to-use. Thousands of companies across North America use our platform to text their customers, generate online reviews, gather leads from their websites, video chat, and collect payments. Based in the Silicon Slopes of Utah, our team is committed helping businesses improve their customer experience and customer communication. To learn more about Kenect, visit kenect.com or text us at (888) 972-7422.
