Who manages Delinquent Churn, Invoice collection, Cancellation Calls?

Morning everyone!

We currently have a gap in our company of who manages delinquent churn, invoice collection, cancellation calls etc. We are a small (ish) team in New Zealand of 21 people so currently, this sits between accounts & the customer success team.

We are aiming to move this process out of the accounts team and keep them more for internal accounting purposes and then have someone responsible for this role who can also have product knowledge so they can provide value to these customers and help them if the situation occurs.

I wanted to know whether:

Anyone has had any trouble with this?
How did you handle it?
Do you have a dedicated role to manage this?
What else was this role responsible for?

We are trying to eventually automate a few of these processes which will help in the long run, however for now our company focus for the next 18 months is on the product so we need to put in a solution before we can automate.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

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Comments

Jeff Heckler

Hi @Sophie Quinn, these are all different and distinct parts of your Customers' Journey:
"delinquent churn, invoice collection, cancellation calls etc."
As such, they need to be separated out and created as playbooks, motions, and workflows with clear ownership.
Be careful not to take on Billing and Payments issues into CS when they should be, and are best handled by that Department.
Otherwise, you will create friction and poor experiences for your customers and teammates.
Unfortunately, I have seen this happen.

Joe Krause

Good morning Sophie,

I hope all is well. I work at a company of similar size and here's our process that works very well for us:

90 days prior to renewal (we have annual contracts) someone from our 2 person finance team joins a Customer Success meeting and we go through each account to ask if it's ok to send the invoice. Most of the time the answer is yes but other times there might be some extra steps we need to take.
Invoices are sent out via our accounting system to our primary champion.
If the invoice is paid on time then no issues.
If the invoice is over 30 days past due we have our CSMs remind the client via email or on a regular status call
If the account moves into 60 days past due an email from our controller gets sent asking for an update on payment.
If the account moves into 90 days past due then we have our CFO draft an email asking for an update. This usually does the trick.

The key to this process working is knowing your various contract terms and notification periods. Once those are set we've been able to keep our AR sheet down to one page.

Hope that helps!

Jeffrey Kushmerek

Hi Sophie,

I really try to make sure that is an Accounts Receivable position that sits in accounting for all things bill collection. Cancellation should be a CSM function, but only in the relationship and making sure that the request is carried out (after they try to convince them not to cancel).