Companies that don’t only want to survive, but thrive, in a post-pandemic world will need to innovate and think of ways to stay ahead of their competition.
If COVID taught us anything, it's that technology has the power to change the way we work and eliminate a range of roadblocks that have the potential to stand in the way of business. One piece of technology that can revolutionise the way you run your organisation is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform with payment gateway integration.
A CRM streamlines the sales cycle, end-to-end, and speeds up the entire process. Consequently, you can get paid on time, take on more projects and scale your company.
In this article, we'll explore the five main perks of using a CRM with integrated payment solutions.
1. Streamline the Payment Process
Time is money, which means that all those hours your Accounts Receivable (AR) team is spending manually processing payments is costing you dearly.
In fact, for the average small-to-mid-sized company, it takes approximately 25 days to process a single invoice manually from receipt to payment. As a result, businesses have to contend with overdue invoices, high processing costs and employees spending their time on long-winded tasks.
CRMs with payment gateway integration speed up the payments process. No more searching through stacks of paper to find the information you need, no more reliance on snail mail to send your customers an invoice and waiting days for their accounting team to handle it, and no more risk of human error that can delay the process further.
Integrated payment solutions allow you to automatically send your customer a payment request via the CRM — where all your other documents are stored — and receive the funds instantly.
Not only will your AR team thank you for freeing up their time to focus on more crucial tasks, but your cash flow will likely remain more consistent.
2. A More Secure Way to Pay
The National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates that businesses lose around £190 billion to fraud each year in the UK. Being a victim of a scam can cause severe financial and reputational damage to your business, so you must have preventative measures in place.
A good CRM provides an additional layer of security that you wouldn't get when you process payments traditionally using legacy systems and paper invoices. All payment data is encrypted and transferred securely, significantly reducing the risk of fraud.
In addition to the added security, a CRM with payment gateway integration can seriously speed up the payments process.
Rather than taking credit card numbers over the phone or waiting for a cheque in the post before passing them over to your accounting department, you can request a payment from your customer directly through the CRM and receive the funds instantly.
3. Convenience for Your Customers
In today's digital world, where convenience and speed are king, failure to meet the standard your customers have come to expect is a surefire way to lose business.
Although B2C payments have continued to innovate and provide modern, user-friendly ways to pay, B2B payments have historically fallen behind. However, B2B organisations are quickly realising due to the COVID crisis that their payments desperately need consumerization.
Say you have a customer who is waiting for your invoice to arrive in the mail before they can send you a cheque, but that same customer was just able to complete a near-instant, cloud-based payment for another company. It's not hard to guess who they would prefer to work with again in the future.
CRMs that have integrated payment solutions vastly improve the customer experience and help maintain your relationship long-term. You can expect far more repeat customers if your processes are painless and consider their needs.
4. Keep Everything in One Place
One of the main benefits of having payment gateway integration in your CRM is that you essentially have a single, central customer database where all the information is correct.
Keeping customer details updated across multiple platforms is slow, destroys team morale, creates duplicates work and increases costs. However, a CRM with payment gateway integration enables your AR team to quickly generate an invoice based on correct, pre-populated information about the customer and accept payments all in the same place.
As a result, you can expect far less human error and mismatched data. With all the time saved, you and your team can focus on more valuable work.
5. See the Bigger Picture
Integrating your payment processing tools with your CRM will be instrumental in helping you understand your business better, not only financially, but also from a marketing perspective.
Usually, when you acquire a new lead, you mark the source in the CRM. However, if your CRM and payments platform aren't integrated, it becomes trickier to see the true ROI on each of your marketing channels.
Suppose you want to learn which channels provide you with the most repeat customers, which channels generate the most ROI and which channels attract the most new clients. In that case, it's essential to employ a CRM with integrated payment solutions, which lets you see financial and client data in the same place.
Learn More about Integrated Payment Solutions with BigChange
Using a complete job management platform like BigChange enables you to stay ahead of the curve.
Create financial documents quickly based on pre-saved line items or automatically calculated job costs. Generate and share invoices, quotes, estimates, purchase orders and credit notes in seconds.
Want to find out more?
Discover how BigChange can make your business grow stronger here and arrange a free demo today.
