Businesses must attain a balance between maximizing productivity, reducing risk, and fulfilling customer requirements. This balance is crucial because while every business has a specialty, few excel at every single aspect of running a successful enterprise – nor should they. An enterprise should focus on its core, revenue generating work, and related customer service efforts.
But effective business management requires a broader focus. Efficient transaction processing is a prerequisite for success. Turning massive amounts of business-critical information generated not only through said transactions but also by active account management into effective outcomes, is another.
The numerous, intricate daily transaction and information management processes undertaken by any modern enterprise can lead to errors in payment processing, missed communications deadlines, or a variety of workflow-based issues - which can all lead to delayed or lost revenue, and even worse - aggravated customers.
By leveraging specialized knowledge platforms through an external partner, enterprises can gain access to innovative end-to-end solutions, integrating data aggregation, workflow, analytics, payment processing, exception management and outcome resolutions. Technology and knowledge platforms help automate and streamline high-volume, mission-critical processes for business across industries.
Here are three specific ways leveraging a specialized partner who leverages key technology can help organizations streamline operations and focus on their core, strategic goals:
- Inject Automation into Transaction & Info Management Processes Can Reduce Errors
Organizations today are confronted with enormous amounts of data to process. It’s not uncommon for a given enterprise to be processing an average of 15,000 invoices per day – or tens of thousands of documents per week. This already-daunting task is further complicated by issues like the use of multiple, disparate legacy computer systems. Or, a lack of an effective business-continuity plan ensuring operations can continue in the event of a power outage, extreme weather, or any other type of major disruption to a business. Confronting these issues effectively from a strictly internal perspective might be difficult. These types of issues however can be mitigated by partnering with a specialized technology provider who focuses on managing such complex processes. For example, some providers can implement a single, integrated system which manages the capture, processing, research and archival of payments, invoices, and other related documents. These systems can support both electronic and paper transactions, and offer a number of benefits, including: cost savings on payments processing, streamlined processes which improve productivity, automated ‘match rates’ to preemptively reduce errors, and on-site support from the end-user company’s own IT team – creating a highly integrated, independent, and effectively efficient system.
- Leverage Specialized, Tech-Based Partnerships is a Proven Way to Maintain Focus on Customer Service, Sales, and Core Strengths
When a business grows, so can document volume. At a certain point, the growth may overwhelm manual, or paper-based systems to process said documents. Over time, this will begin to impede customer service delivery, which can impact that growth itself. While confronting the issues that accompany rapid growth is a problem every business stakeholder would like to have – it is also one that must be addressed. Even without substantial growth, processes can simply age out of effectiveness.
When a company needs to improve processes, and put in place superior workflow technology, it can be less costly, more time efficient, and ultimately, more effective to partner with a reliable, proven supplier. This way, the client enterprise gains a true partner, one who can commit to developing, deploying, and monitoring new processes and systems that are scalable over time. Attempting to develop everything internally would be complex and costly.
- Link BPO & Transaction Processing Services (TPS) to the Same Provider to Provide Maximum Governance, Cost Savings, & Efficiency
BPO has been established as an effective way for enterprises to streamline and update internal processes to refocus on core, revenue-generating work. Yet, many of the benefits can be negated by complicated vendor management scenarios, where one outsourcer is handling payment processing for instance, and another is managing the print and mail work for statements, invoices, and other communications. By bringing all the areas of your enterprise under the same supplier, organizations gain a single point of contact to control and monitor these actions, leverage synergies across the business and often time reduce costs – creating the simplified management structure needed to maximize the value of these efforts.
Outsourcing to a single vendor who can handle your needs holistically has other benefits, too. When handled in-house, line items like statement generation, call centers, lockbox services and payment processing really add up. But full-service, end-to-end BPOs absorb these costs or provide them at a much lower rate than a single enterprise could negotiate with providers on their own.
As noted, every business has a specialty. Joining forces with one whose focus is different and mutually beneficial can provide better results at lower costs than handling everything in-house. Particularly if that partner has a robust service and solution offering to handle the entirety of your periphery.
As the business world becomes increasingly competitive, a need to refocus on customer service and core operational goals has emerged. One effective strategy that’s surfaced is BPO – a strategy which becomes even more effective when all areas that are outsourced can be handled by a single, holistic outsourcing partner.
