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Enhance Your B2B Customer Experience with Integrated Payments

By Lori London posted 03-02-2021 09:00 AM

  

There’s always been a need to make the order-to-cash process faster, more convenient, and just overall better.  With the ERP at the center of order processing in the B2B sales realm, the mission to improve these processes often relies on the development or extension of these systems.  One of the most common ways to enhance the ERP and thus, level up the order-to-cash process in an organization, is by integrating payments technology.  While integrating payments into the ERP instance has its benefits for the internal organization, especially accounting departments, it also provides significant benefits to the customers the business serves.  By taking advantage of leading payments integrations, businesses around the globe can improve the way they do business with their customers, thus increasing their revenue.

More Payment Method Options

The payment industry is always hard at work developing and perfecting the ways in which we pay for everything, even between businesses.  Although the standards for B2B payments have been paper invoices, checks, and even cash, due to the evolution of technology and recent global events more and more companies are seeking out electronic or digital payment options.  Now, with a single integration into an existing ERP, companies can offer their customers the ability to pay with credit cards, bank transfers, and more.

Now, with the right payment technology integration, companies can even offer B2B customers the ability to schedule payments in advance, split payments, or even set recurring payments.  Again, with the right options made available to customers, companies can increase their payments acceptance rates and overall improve their customer satisfaction.

Less Time from Order to Payment Completion

There’s no question that electronic payment methods are speeding up the time in which an order can be completed, from placement to reconciliation.  Now, with these payment options integrated directly to the ERP, the time from when an order is place to the time goods are received and payment is settled is even quicker.  Leading integration technology can now add automation to order processing, by allowing payment to be directly matched to an electronic invoice, then automatically reconciled in the backend.  With these integrations, the supplier can get paid faster, and the customer can keep more accurate accounting records instead of dealing with the wait time for a check to clear.

Increased Visibility

Gone are the days when invoices and their payment status had to be managed across several disjointed systems, and sometimes even error-prone spreadsheets.  The manual nature of B2B sales and order processing has been updated by today’s ERP integrations, that can allow the businesses on both sides of a sale to see clearly the status of an order and the payment for it.  With a single integration, companies can maintain real-time visibility into outstanding orders, past due payments, and even shipment details in one place.  This is a benefit to both the vendor and the purchaser, as both companies seek to optimize their operations.

Maximized Security

Consider the risk involved with emailing invoices, keeping paper records, mailing checks, and even trusting delivery people to handle payments.  All these activities, and more, present an incredible amount of danger to the data and payments information of companies doing business with each other.  Now, companies that integrate payments technology into their ERP can also benefit from the added cyber security features that are included.  More specifically, when the payments technology incorporates tokenization of any sensitive data within the ERP, companies can offer their customers the reassurance that their PII and card data remains protected from exposure.  Customers value data protection and are far more likely to continue doing business with companies who value it as much as they do.

Bringing It All Together

Adding payments technology to your ERP system is not only a way to unify your operations and other backend systems, but also a way to expand your business’s value to your customers.  With a payment technology partner like Worldpay from FIS, you can increase payment method options, enable cross-border processing, and even minimize your PCI-audit scope with a just one integration and without increasing payment processing costs.  Say goodbye to systems that don’t speak to each other and labor-intensive processes, and embrace a future of automated and streamlined B2B payments and order processing, all within the ERP you are using today.

About the Author: Lori is the Sr. Marketing Manager for Worldpay B2B Payments who focuses on enabling commercial teams, solution specialists, and the organisations they work with by providing thought-leadership content that leverages the industry and business’ latest and most valuable data. Through effective story-telling and primarily digital promotional activities, she drives effective communication that connects organisations with solutions that improve their businesses.