Interactive
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
measure risk on an ongoing basis. They can monitor trading levels and manage exposure. A customer that turns out to be a slow payer and that is exhibiting negative performance could have its credit terms renegotiated, or requested to pay a bond upfront prior to the delivery of mer- chandise. The finance team can also use the greater intelligence provided by credit reports to prioritise collections and chase the most risky payments.
The marketing function can also tap into credit reports when identifying creditworthy companies to target with specific offers and cleaning their own CRM data using industry validated informa- tion.
When Creditsafe reports are integrated with core systems, companies can undertake a number of new and useful procedures:
l Search for company reports from accounting, or CRM systems or a dedicated search area
Doing the knowledge
CreditSafe’s Chris Robertson looks at ways to enhance customer lifecycles with informed insights as the company launches a new CRM credit checking facility
One of the effects of ever more powerful technol- ogy and greater proliferation of data is that, in theory at least, every business can now make more informed decisions right through the cus- tomer lifecycle.
For most companies, this lifecycle starts with the qualification of prospects, and that has been tra- ditionally where credit information has been tra- ditionally used. It is good practice to consider the creditworthiness of new prospects so that you don’t waste time with customers who end up not paying their bills for services or products ren- dered.
Traditionally, these initial checks have been made by credit controllers or others in the finance team. However, the rise of easy to use, online credit reporting tools has led to the ‘democratisation’ of credit reporting, where everyone in the business, including sales teams, can make more informed choices about who to do business with.
However this can now be spread even further and we are now entering a new phase where informa- tion within credit reports can be more tightly inte- grated throughout a customer’s lifecycle with a broad set of business applications such as cus- tomer relationship management (CRM) and finance & accounting.
For example, Creditsafe has developed its
Integrated Solutions platform, including an appli- cation programming interface (API) that makes it easy for organisations to blend information from credit reports seamlessly into their everyday business processes.
This is, of course, particularly relevant when com- panies are looking to improve their ‘know your customer’ (KYC) processes. KYC describes the general good practice of checking that customers are who they say they are, but is also the official name for regulatory compliance designed to pre- vent money laundering and fraud.
KYC implies not taking information provided by clients at face value, but instead gathering intelli- gence over and above basic identification. So as well as using credit reports to look at the financial well-being of prospects at the beginning of the customer lifecycle, companies can, for example use them to check and confirm registered addresses before invoicing.
Once organisations have invoiced a company and been successfully paid they will generally look to win repeat business. At this point it makes sense to look again at the financial position of clients to see if anything has changed, such as credit rating, new or different directors or whether any CCJs have been applied to a business.
Finally, companies can use credit reports to 6 7
l Map credit ratings, limits and other valuable information to customer records
l Create new accounts or leads from company reports
l Create new contact records for company direc- tors
l Define credit thresholds based on company policy
l Look at group structures and international cov- erage
The Integrated Solutions platform enables organi- sations to access credit reports on 120 million companies directly from their finance and CRM applications. The API has been developed to work out of the box with market leading pack- ages such as Sage, SAP, Microsoft Navision,
Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics and Sugar CRM as well as with business systems developed in-house.
Accurate information is the currency of success- ful business. Decisions need no longer be made on gut feel or on the basis of personal judgement – indeed the principles of KYC dictate that as much investigation as possible is undertaken before commercial terms are put into place and extended through the customer lifecycle.
Chris Robertson, UK Managing Director, CreditSafe
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