Thinking of Outsourcing Your Credit Control?
For many businesses there are several benefits to be gained from outsourcing Credit Control. Probably the most obvious one is that it means your Credit Control will be done by a team of experts - Credit Control is their job, it isn’t an extra duty being squeezed in to a packed schedule of other higher priority tasks. Outsourcing your Credit Control will mean that it will always get done and will never be at the mercy of that common excuse of something more important coming up.
Let’s face it, what could be more important? This is about getting paid, it’s also about protecting valuable business relationships and it is about achieving an accurate picture of the financial status of your business. Let’s take a look at some of the other benefits of outsourcing your Credit Control.
Technology
If you were to manage your Credit Control in-house, you would need to invest in the right technology. You would need to select a debtor management system to meet the needs of your sales cycle, is aligned to your business and can provide you with the data you need to ensure accurate performance reporting. You would need to have a clear understanding of what you would need the system to do to ensure you can make the right choice and you would need to have the budget to select the most effective system for your business. Of course choosing and funding a system is only part of the picture, you would also need to keep it bang up to date and have an ongoing training programme to ensure your staff operate, input and maintain it correctly. However by outsourcing your Credit Control, you won’t have to consider this significant investment - let the investment in technology and the ongoing system management be someone else’s concern.
People
What people skills are needed to be a successful Credit Controller, what are the (ongoing) training requirements and where will you find a reliable and effective source of Credit Control staff? Finding and building an effective team of skilled Credit Management experts who are focussed entirely on Credit Control is challenging. Many businesses are skilled at identifying the people and skills they need when they are recruiting for their core business. Outsourced Credit Control specialists have already established the right skill set, they understand the unique combination of negotiation, service and sales skills required. They are experts in this area because this is their core business.
Customer Experience
Another major benefit of outsourcing Credit Control is the improvement it can mean to your customers because effective Credit Control can identify and help to resolve upfront defects. If your customers are regularly frustrated by failures in other process areas, e.g. billing, sales or pricing, outsourced credit control will help to resolve these.
Management Information
Having an accurate picture of the health of the financials of your business is essential to developing your business profitably. By outsourcing your Credit Control you will immediately gain improved data, meaningful analytics and useful MI to help you focus on running your core business.
Manage volume
The ability to alter the volume of resource to meet the needs of an irregular sales cycle is a significant benefit of using an outsourced team. Rather than having the distraction at busy times of having to recruit and train staff to manage short term increases in workload, your outsourced team will be set up to increase or decrease the resource focussed on your business to suit your timing, at short notice.
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