IBM - Best Return on Customer Service Investment

Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Return on Customer Service Investment

Nomination Title: Bill Tailor – Simplifying Manual Invoices

To address several limitations referenced above, the Billing and Accounts Receivable team developed Bill Tailor (see https://ibm.box.com/s/n3bzzkkfqgba9b2g1tupp7noc8ex3iar for a quick demo).

BillTailor is a desktop application that simplifies the work for Billing and Accounts Receivable Representatives to create invoices or corrections to split, combine, format invoices per customer's requirement while automating invoice reconciliation for easy cash application once payments are received.

Ease of use and new functionality in the Bill Tailor tool impacts Billing and Receivables units similarly with the following results:

• Invoice modification processing time reduced by 35% equating to an annual 10,300 hours of manpower / productivity
• 100% elimination of calculation errors
• Annual reduction of 1060 hours applying client payments.
• Allows for improvement of DSO metric as client payments are immediately applied according to the modifications.
• A reduction of time spent on these tasks permits staff to focus on other core job efforts such as collection.

IBM’s Billing and Accounts Receivables are key business units of our Quote to Cash (Q2C) organization, issuing and collecting more than 400,000 (US) invoices annually on a diverse range of products and services. The Billing and Accounts Receivables team is responsible for managing invoice change requests, resolving billing disputes, invoice collection and payment application.

While billing and receivables is crucial in any business’ cash health, these teams also play an important role in client satisfaction. Issues in billing accuracy are costly for not only IBM but also the client alike. Despite the urgency to curtail customer dissatisfaction, fixing both one-time and recurring charges are often a complicated matter. Invoice documents are fed from multiple systems and any cosmetic or substantive changes presented to a client must be clearly documented; one cannot simply remove a questioned charge. An auditable process must be followed that changes the systems of record to ensure future billing is accurate. And barring the business requirements of modifying billing, consider the task itself: cutting, pasting, and balancing charges on one or more complex documents.

Bill Tailor development costs were significantly low at approximately $35K USD while estimated annual savings are calculated to be $100K US thus a 285% Return of Investment in the first year alone.

The development of new code was minimal since Bill Tailor utilises the existing platform's APIs while also optimising performances through the use of simultaneous processing tasks.

Bill Tailor aims at improving both aspects of the special treatment of IBM billing- modification and payment application. While the former and the latter may not improve upon timely payment, the latter will certainly bank it sooner and therefore impact DSO.